LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



UNDER THE EVENING LAMP 



MR. STODDARD'S POEMS 



POETICAL WRITINGS. With Portrait. 
8vo, extra gilt, .... $4.00 

THE LION'S CUB, and Other Verse. 
l6mo, 1 - 2 S 



UNDER THE EVENING LAMP 



BY 

V 
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 



i 

NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1892 






Copyright, 1892, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROW OIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



PREFACE 

The papers in this volume were written in 
pursuance of an idea which was suggested to 
me some years since as a variation of a kind of 
writing I was then engaged upon, and which, 
when they were once begun, gradually shaped 
itself into a plan, what at first was inclination 
becoming at last determination. For reasons 
which do not concern the reader of this page 
my sympathies were more strongly drawn tow- 
ard those who had been worsted by misfortune 
than toward those who, favored by fortune, had 
marched on gayly and triumphantly. The story 
of happy lives is soon read. There have been 
happy lives, even among poets, but they are not 
many; for it is true of poets above all other 
men, that many are called, but few are chosen. 
Why so few are chosen would be worth serious 
consideration, if the question was not constant- 
ly answered in the history of the tuneful tribe, 



VI PKEFACE 

which teaches us, if it teaches anything, that 
the majority were not called, or only called by 
their ambition and their vanity — ambition for 
which there was no justification, and vanity for 
which there was no excuse. They deluded them- 
selves, and paid the penalty of their delusions. 
There are among these papers studies of some 
of these unfortunates, and, I dare say, there is a 
lesson in these studies, though I have not sought 
to find it. It is enough for me to tell the tale ; 
others may point the moral. I have been more 
interested in their lives than in their writings, 
my object being biographical rather than criti- 
cal, and if I have succeeded in interesting the 
reader in these outlines of biography, I have 
done what I tried to do. He will find some 
things here, I think, which he will not readily 
find elsewhere, and others, I hope, which, new or 
old, will help him to pass a quiet hour under 
the evening lamp. 

E. H. S. 

The Century, 
October 29, 1892. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Scotch Contempobabies of Burns, ... 1 

James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd), . . 46 

William Motherwell, 77 

The Early Years of Gtffobd, .... 91 

Kobert Bloomfield, 105 

John Clare, . 120 

Ebenezeb Elliott, 135 

David Gbay, . 150 

William Blake, 164 

Habtley Colebidge, ...... 182 

Thomas Loyell Beddoes, 200 

Geobge Dabley, 213 

Thomas Loye Peacock, 225 

Edwabd Fitzgebald, 245 

KlCHABD MONCKTON MlLNES (LOBD HOUGHTON), . 263 



SCOTCH CONTEMPOEAKIES OP 
BUKNS 



One hundred and thirty-three years have passed 
since the birth of Robert Burns, and ninety-six years 
since his death, and, during all that time, no such 
poet as he has illuminated the literature of Great 
Britain. Greater poets have come and gone in By- 
ron and Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats ; but, with 
the exception of Byron, no poet who was so surely 
born and not made, who owed so little to books and 
so much to himself, and who so absolutely followed 
the bent of his own genius. There was much in 
common between Burns and Byron, in spite of the 
different ranks in which they were born, and the 
different worlds in which they moved : for each was 
a man of strong understanding, with strong passions, 
gifted with humor> wit, sarcasm, which he used and 
abused ; self-willed and impulsive, wild and way- 
ward, a fiery spirit, an elemental force, whose com- 
etary course was splendid but destructive. Both lived 



a SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

intensely ; both loved, suffered, and were unhappy, 
and both died nearly at the same age, Byron at 
thirty-seven, and Burns at thirty- eight. The fame 
of both was sudden and has been permanent, and 
the poetic life of both was confined within twelve 
years. Other parallels between them might be 
made ; but as it is not my intention to compare 
them I shall not make these parallels, my present 
business lying with Burns and his contemporaries. 
The early years of Burns are better known to us 
than those of any other modern poet, and they are 
worthy of being better known, since they show us 
as nothing else could the force of the genius w 7 hich 
could endure their hardships, and free itself from 
their limitations. Sent to school when a boy, he 
learned all that his master, Murdoch, could teach 
him, which at first was to read English tolerably, to 
write a little, to understand more or less the princi- 
ples of grammar, and, later, to begin the reading of 
French. Murdoch loaned him a Life of Hannibal, 
the village blacksmith loaned him The Life of Sir 
William Wallace, and from other persons at later 
periods he obtained the loan of such serious classics 
as Derham's Physico-Theology, Kay's Wisdom of 
God in the Works of Creation, Stackhouse's History 
of the Bible, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original 
Sin, Hervey's Meditations, and Locke's Essay upon 
the Human Understanding, and such secular clas- 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 6 

sics as The Spectator, Pope's Homer, The Works of 
Pope, Richardson's Pamela, Smollett's Ferdinand 
Count Fathom and Peregrine Pickle, some of the 
plays of Shakespeare, a collection of songs entitled 
The Lark, and The Works of Allan Ramsay. It was 
from these books, to which should be added two or 
three agricultural works, that "Burns received his 
early literary education. They were procured only 
at intervals, and read only when opportunities of- 
fered, which was at night, when the work of the day 
was done. For the work of the day had to be done, 
and the children of the Burns family had to do 
their share of it. They were poor — how poor, Gil- 
bert Burns, the brother of Robert, tells us : "We 
lived very sparingly. For several years butcher's 
meat was a stranger in the house, while all the 
members of the family exerted themselves to the ut- 
most of their strength, and rather beyond it, in the 
labors of the farm. My brother, at the age of thir- 
teen, assisted in threshing the crop of corn, for we 
had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish 
of mind we felt at our tender years under these 
straits and difficulties was very great. To think of 
our father growing old (for he was now above fifty), 
broken down with the long-continued fatigues of his 
life, with a wife and five other children, in a declin- 
ing state of circumstances ; these reflections pro- 
duced in my brother's mind and mine sensations of 



4 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

the deepest distress. I doubt not but the bard labor 
and sorrow of this period of his life was in a great 
measure the cause of that depression of spirits with 
which Robert was so often afflicted through his 
whole life afterward." 

Burns found what relief he could from the hard- 
ships of his life in reading ; but he could not have 
found much in the books of Derham and Bay, or Her- 
vey and Stackhouse, which were so precious in the 
eyes of his grave-minded father ; so, when he had 
gone through them in a perfunctory way, he turned 
to his song-book and his Ramsay, and read them 
over and over. They held, though he may not have 
guessed it at first, the key of his genius, the lock 
of which he was to discover, as he grew older, in 
the heart of some bonirie, sweet, sonsie lass. Italian 
rather than Scotch in temperament, he was a born 
lover. His first love was a girl a year younger than 
himself, with whom he was coupled, according to 
the country custom, as her partner in the labors of 
the harvest, with whom he used to loiter behind in 
the evening when returning from their labors, and 
for whom his heart used to beat so furiously when he 
looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out 
the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. This girl, Nelly 
Kilpatrick, the daughter of the blacksmith who had 
loaned him The Life of Sir William Wallace, sang 
sweetly, and among her songs there was one which 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 5 

was said to be composed by the son of a small laird 
on a maid of his father's, with whom he was in love. 
The singing of this song, and the love he felt, or 
supposed he felt, for the singer, was the first known 
poetic inspiration of Burns, who saw no reason why 
he might not rhyme as well as the other country 
lad, for, excepting that he could smear sheep and 
cut peat, his father living in the moorlands, he bad 
no more scholar-craft than himself. He proceeded, 
therefore, to celebrate his Handsome Nell to the 
tune of her favorite reel, / am a man unmarried, 
and if his song was superior to that which inspired 
it the latter must have been poor indeed, for of his 
seven stanzas all but two lines (which are not re- 
markable) are utterly commonplace. Here are the 
two lines : 

And then there's something in her gait 
Gars ony dress look weel. 

It would not be difficult to trace the lyrical prog- 
ress of Burns at this period, his memoirs have been 
written so often, and with such fulness ; but I shall 
not attempt it, since this progress was by no means 
a royal one, for what with his Nannies, his Tibbies, 
his Peggies, his Mysies, his Jennies, the list of his 
loves is as, long as that in Cowley's famous Chron- 
icle. It was a more substantial list, however ; for 
the ladies in Cowley's ballad were shadows, while 



6 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

the lassies in his song were solid flesh and blood — 
the daughters of farmers in the neighborhood, or 
these not responding to his advances, the female 
servants of their fathers, the milk-maid, the kitchen- 
maid, or what not ; for Master Kobert was too ar- 
dent to be choice in selecting his sweethearts. He 
was twenty-four or twenty-five before he wrote a 
love poem which was worthy of his genius. It was 
his exquisite song to Mary Morrison, which reads as 
if it came of itself, without premeditation, and with- 
out labor ; a perfect song of a perfect kind. 

Burns was not precocious, in the sense that Cow- 
ley and Pope and Chatterton were precocious ; and 
no poet, however great his gifts, could have been 
precocious within the limitations that confined his 
childhood and youth. No man who has not been 
compelled to earn his bread, not now and then, but 
day after day, month after month, year after year, 
can form any, the least, idea of his life, which, in his 
own powerful words, united the cheerless gloom of 
a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave. 
It weighed heavily upon, though it did not entirely 
crush, his spirit, which constantly asserted itself in 
sallies of wild humor and gusts of sharp satire ; but 
it was fatal while it lasted to the cultivation of his 
powers, for which, however strenuously he might 
seek it, he had absolutely no leisure. His lines had 
fallen in hard places. It was not until the family 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 7 

removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea, and he 
escaped the rigidity of his home life, and mixed in 
the little world about him, that he began to discover 
what he was. He caught glimpses of himself in the 
eyes of women, which revealed his capacity for love ; 
but a clearer and broader light than they flashed 
upon him was necessary to reveal his capacity for 
thought ; women helped him to discover his heart, 
it remained for man to help him discover his under- 
standing. 

Toward the end of his twenty-first year Burns 
was, if not the projector, one of the projectors of the 
Bachelor's Club at Torbolton. At the first meeting, 
which was held on the evening of November 11, 
1780 (Hallowe'en), he was chosen president ; and 
then the club proceeded to debate a question in 
which its members were, or might be, interested, and 
which may be roughly described as a consideration 
of the qualities which ought to influence a young 
man in his choice of a wife. We may imagine, if 
we care to, the arguments in favor of a girl with a 
large fortune and a girl with no fortune, but they 
are not set down in the minutes of the club, which 
simply state that its members found themselves so 
very happy that they resolved to continue to meet 
once a month. They elected new members from 
time to time, and among them at the end of six 
months was David Sillar, who was the first of his 



8 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

poetic contemporaries to enjoy the friendship of 
Burns. 

The son of Patrick Sillar, the tenant of a farm at 
Spittleside, about a mile from Torbolton, David was 
a year younger than Kobert, and like him was a la- 
borer on his father's farm, and a poet. He sought 
the acquaintance of Burns, who was becoming known 
among his neighbors for his social habits, his satir- 
ical disposition, and the freedom of his opinions, 
and was introduced to him by his brother Gilbert. 
There was something striking in his appearance at 
this time ; he wore the only tied hair in the parish, 
and at church he wrapped his plaid about his shoul- 
ders in a particular — which, I suppose, means a 
picturesque — manner. They were friends at once, 
and meeting often on Sunday at church, they 
strolled off between the sermons, not to the inn with 
their friends and lasses, but across the fields, along 
the banks of the Ayr, or into the woods of Stair. 
There was but one drawback to their walks, and that 
was the womenfolk, meeting with whom turned the 
current of Burns's mind into new channels, and was 
a death-blow to their conversation. 

Sillar made the acquaintance of Burns when he 
needed manly society of a better sort than was open 
to him at Torbolton. There were men enough there 
with whom he could crack a merry joke, take a so- 
cial glass, and be hail-fellow well met ; but until he 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 9 

met Sillar no one who could understand him, and 
call out what was best in him. There comes a time 
in the life of every young poet when books can do 
no more for him ; they have taught him all they had 
to teach, and whatever else there is for him to learn 
he must seek elsewhere. Books may inspire, but 
they cannot mature. The inspiration of Kamsay and 
Ferguson is evident in the early verse of Burns ; 
but I see no maturity in anything that he wrote be- 
fore his Epistle to Davie, which was finished before 
his twenty-sixth birthday. He had written well 
before, exceedingly well in Mary Morrison, and 
The Rigs o' Barley ; but he had given no sign that 
a new and great poet had come, a poet who could 
think as well as feel, and who had something to say 
that was worth the hearing of mankind. Without 
knowing it, he had obeyed the command of Sidney's 
Muse, and had looked in his heart and written. 

The personal element in this epistle was manly 
and sincere, and the philosophical element was clear, 
strong, and wise. There was a certain sadness in it, 
as there is apt to be in all personal poetry, but there 
was no sorrow, and no misanthropy. It reminds 
one of no Scottish or English poet ; and if it reminds 
one of any poet, it is of the Latin Horace, whose 
sagacious worldly spirit seemed to hover at times 
over his rustic scholar. 

The career of Sillar was a checkered but in the 



10 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

main a prosperous one. More averse from manual 
labor than Burns, he started a small school at Com- 
raonside, near Torbolton, but finding that venture 
unprofitable he removed to Irvine, and opened a 
grocer's shop. He was of a canny turn of mind, 
and might have done well in trade if he had re- 
sisted his habit of versifying, a habit which in- 
creased with him after Burns published his first 
volume at Kilmarnock. The success of that little 
book, which was as marked in its way as the 
success of Childe Harold a quarter of a century 
later, was the making of Burns, but the marring of 
several of his countrymen of the same rank in life, 
and among others of his brother poet, who must 
needs collect and publish Poems by David Sillar, 
to which he prefaced an Introduction that began 
as follows : " Mankind in general, but particularly 
those who have had the advantage of a liberal edu- 
cation, may deem it presumption in the author, who 
has been denied that privilege, to attempt either in- 
struction or amusement. But however necessary a 
learned education may be in Divinity, Philosophy, 
or the Sciences, it is a fact that some of the best 
Poetical Performances amongst us have been com- 
posed by illiterate men. Natural genius alone is 
sufficient to constitute a poet ; for, the imperfections 
in the works of many poetical writers, which are 
ascribed to want of education, may, he believes, with 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 11 

more justice, be ascribed to want of genius. He 
leaves every person to judge of his by his writings." 
The readers of Sillar, so far as he had any, judged 
his genius by his writings, and let them alone — a 
neglect which was a misfortune to him, for what 
with the expense of getting out his book and his 
inattention to business he soon became a bankrupt, 
and was thrown into jail for a debt of five pounds. 
Released at last — how, it does not appear, but 
not through assistance from his friends, who refused 
to help him — he returned to his occupation as a 
teacher, and opened a school for the instruction of 
adult sailors in navigation, a branch of education 
which proved more remunerative than the writing 
of verse ; for the number of his scholars gradually 
increased until their tuition yielded him about a 
hundred pounds a year. By strict economy and 
minding the main chances he continued to prosper 
as the years went on. He married twice, his first 
wife being a widow of Irvine, his second, a maid of 
Kilmarnock, raised a family of children, and in- 
herited property from his brothers — by the death of 
the youngest, William, the farm at Spittleside and a 
considerable sum of money, and by the death of the 
two elder ones, Robert and John, what they had 
amassed as African merchants. No one knew the 
amount of the fortune he received, for he was close- 
mouthed, but it was so large that, he concluded to 



12 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURKS 

give up his school and live like a gentleman, in a 
quiet, unostentatious way. He died May 2, 1830, 
at the age of seventy. Such was David Sillar, the 
first poetic contemporary of Burns. 

Not long after the death of the head of the family, 
which occurred on February 13, 1784, the Burns 
family removed to Mossgiel, two or three miles 
from Lochlea. They were as poor as ever ; but 
under their new head, for such Robert, as the eldest 
son, was, they were not so gloomy as they had been, 
but, on proper occasions, and within the limits of 
becoming mirth, were merry. It is well to remem- 
ber the dead for what they were, but it is also well 
to remember the living for what they are, and are 
to be. We owe something to ourselves, and the 
first, if not the greatest, of our debts is to be cheer- 
ful, and, so far as we can — happy. The young folk 
met their kind oftener at Mossgiel than at Loch- 
lea, and one of their first meetings there was on 
Fastens e'en (Shrovetide) at a rocking, a festival which 
derived its name from the rocks, or distaffs, which 
countrywomen in the olden time used for spinning, 
and which they used to take with them when they 
visited their neighbors' houses, as our grandmothers 
used to take their knitting and sewing. Men and 
women met together at these rockings in the last 
century in Scotland, feasted in their frugal fashion, 
chatted, laughed, and sang songs. At this partic- 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 13 

ular rocking at Mossgiel somebody sang a song 
which touched the heart of Burns, who inquired the 
name of its writer, which he was told was JohnLap- 
raik. With the heartiness which was one of his 
most charming qualities, and the desire to make a 
new friend in a brother poet, he wrote a rhymed 
epistle to Lapraik, modelling his lines after a six-line 
stanza which was used by Eamsay and Ferguson, 
and which he had used a few months before in 
his Epistle to John Rankine, and Death and Dr. 
Hornbook. It lacked the gravity and the dignity 
of the fourteen-line stanza which he employed in 
his Epistle to Davie ; but it was equal to his pur- 
pose, which was simply to greet Lapraik, and ex- 
press his personal admiration for his verses. What 
strikes one in these epistles of Burns is the sim- 
plicity which led him to undervalue his own gifts 
and overvalue the slender talents of his friends, for 
slender, indeed, they were when compared with his 
brilliant genius. He was as modest as generous. 
Delighted with his poetic greeting, which was dated 
April 1, 1785, Lapraik sent an answer by his son, 
who on arriving at Mossgiel found Burns in a field. 
" I'm no sure if I ken the han'," he said, as he took 
the letter. Then he opened it, and seeing whom it 
was from, he let go the sheet that contained his 
grain, and did not discover its loss until he finished 
the letter. At the end of three weeks, he wrote 



14 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

Lapraik a second epistle, and on September 13th a 
third, between which dates the singers met twice, the 
first time at Mauchline race, or Mossgiel, the last 
time at Muirsmill, where Burns dined, and spent 
the night, returning to Mossgiel the next morning. 

Lapraik was thirty-two years the senior of Burns. 
He inherited what seems to have been a considera- 
ble property at Dalfram and elsewhere, in the barony 
of Kylesmuir and sheriffdom of Ayr, and lived com- 
fortably, marrying two wives and rearing a family of 
children until his forty-second year, when, in com- 
mon with others about him, he began to borrow 
money from the Ayr Bank, a bubble concern, which, 
starting with a capital of one hundred and fifty 
thousand pounds, contrived to suspend payment in 
two years, and in three years to incur debts to nearly 
seven hundred thousand pounds. It ruined hun- 
dreds, among them the laird of Dalfram, who, not 
content with obtaining discounts for himself, guar- 
anteed others for a large amount. At first he let 
his lands, then he sold them ; at last, failing to free 
himself from legal prosecution, he was arrested, and 
confined in Ayr jail, where he composed the song 
that Burns admired. He was flattered by the at- 
tentions that Burns paid him in his epistles, and 
having, like most poets, small as well as great, a 
kind of ignorant belief in himself, he resolved to 
publish his verse as Burns had done. So two years 



SCOTCH CONTEMPOEAEIES OF BURNS 15 

after the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of 
Burns there appeared, from the same press, Poems 
on Several Occasions, by John Lapraik. His last 
days were passed at Muirkirk, where he kept a 
small public-house, not far from the church, and 
where he served at the village post-office. Postman, 
publican, and poet, he died in May, 1807, at the age 
of eighty. Such was John Lapraik, the second po- 
etic contemporary of Burns. 

The volumes of Lapraik and Sillar contain noth- 
ing that anybody would be likely to read for its own 
sake ; and if their names have been preserved from 
oblivion it is because they were fortunate enough to 
be known by Burns. Lapraik was probably the 
better poet of the two. He was certainly so in the 
song which Burns liked, and which I copy below, 
not as it stands in his book, but as it appeared later 
in Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, where it was 
retouched and bettered, probably by Burns himself : 

When I Upon Thy Bosom Lean. 

When I upon thy bosom lean, 

And fondly clasp thee, a' my ain, 
I glory in the sacred ties 

That made us ane wha ance were twain ; 
A mutual flame inspires us baith, 

The tender look, the melting kiss ; 
Even years shall ne'er destroy our love 

But only gie us change o' bliss. 



16 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

Hae I a wish ? It's a' for thee ; 

I ken thy wish is me to please ; 
Our moments pass sae smooth away 

That numbers on us look and gaze. 
Weel pleased they see our happy days, 

Nor envy's sel' finds aught to blame ; 
And aye when weary cares arise 

Thy bosom still shall be my hame. 

I'll lay me there, and take my rest ; 

And if that aught disturb my dear, 
I'll bid her laugh her cares away, 

And beg her not to drap a tear. 
Hae I a joy ? It's a' her ain ; 

United still her heart and mine ; 
They're like the woodbine round the tree, 

That's twined till death shall them disjoin. 



n. 



No one can read a poet understanding^ without 
knowing something about bis life, nor estimate tbe 
value of bis verse without knowing something about 
the kind of verse which it illustrates. We cannot 
read Homer by the light of biography, for we know 
absolutely nothing about him ; but we can read 
the Iliad and the Odyssey by their own light, and 
imagine the personality of their unknown creator 
from the splendor of his creations. The little that 
has reached us concerning Shakespeare does not 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 17 

help us to comprehend his genius, which cannot be 
regarded as the natural growth of any of the known 
facts of his life, nor, on any rational view of heredity, 
as an intellectual inheritance from any discoverable 
ancestor. Without ancestors, and without descend- 
ants, he was, and is, himself alone. We cannot ac- 
count for him, but we can account for his dramatic 
work, which was the product of his period. Begun 
by Marlowe, who was an elemental force in poetry 
in the age of Elizabeth, as Byron was an elemental 
force in poetry in the age of the third and fourth 
Georges, it passed into the mighty hands of Shake- 
speare when his fiery spirit was let out into eternity 
before he was thirty, in a tavern brawl by the dagger 
of Francis Archer, and by him and his fellows, Jon- 
son, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Ford, and others 
of that noble line, of whom the last was Shirley, it 
was carried to a perfection that no later dramatist 
has ever attained. Ancestry and parentage give us 
the clue to the character of Byron, which was singu- 
larly compounded from the stormy and unreason- 
ing passion of his mother and the calm, calculating 
profligacy of his father ; but they do not give us 
the clue to his genius, nor to his poetry, which was 
modelled after none that was produced before it. 
He admired, or pretended to admire Pope, and tried 
in his poetic nonage to follow in his footsteps ; but 
the more he followed the worse he wrote, and it was 



18 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES' OF BURNS 

not until he ceased to write satiric couplets, as in 
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and Hints 
from Horace, and began to write in the ottava rima 
of the Italian poets, as in Beppo, The Vision of 
Judgment, and Don Juan, that the world saw how 
genuine and great he was as a satirist. He owed 
nothing to Pope in these poems, and nothing to any 
poet in Childe Harold, Manfred, and Cain, which 
were partly the outgrowth of his melancholy, daring 
genius, and partly the outgrowth of the unrest of 
the turbulent time in which he lived, and of which 
he was the poetic voice. 

No British poet demands for a thorough under- 
standing of his verse so intimate a knowledge of his 
life and its environments and the literary influences 
that made him what he was as Robert Burns. No 
one before him, and no one after him, can be said 
to occupy the place that he occupied in the history 
of Scottish poetry. There was no relationship be- 
tween him and Barbour, Dunbar, Bishop Douglas, 
and Sir David Lindsay, or only such shadowy rela- 
tionship as may be supposed to exist among men of 
the same race and speech ; he belonged to an ob- 
scure line, the names of whose founders have per- 
ished, though their genius has been preserved in 
the songs they sung. The story of his life is the 
story of the life of a farmer's son in the last half of 
the last century in Scotland ; like that of his father 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 19 

before him, and his father before him — it was poor, 
it was narrow, it was laborious. Father and son — 
father and sons and daughters — the Burns family 
earned their daily bread by the daily use of their 
hands. There was, there could be, no cessation 
from work until their hands were folded and their 
eyes closed in the last slumber. The father of Burns 
was a plain, simple, right-minded man, staid in his 
temperament and demeanor, deliberate in his way 
of thinking, and, from his early training, and accord- 
ing to his lights, devout and religious. They were 
a serious family, somewhat too serious, it may be, 
for Burns, when he began to think for himself and 
go about among the young people at Lochlea and 
Mossgiel. But however this may have been, and 
whatever the wisdom or unwisdom of his father's 
conscientious care of him, his character was moulded 
in the home circle, which strengthened if it could not 
broaden it. There was in him the same pattern of 
manhood as in his father, the same sense of duty, 
the same sincerity and honesty, and the same self- 
respect and pride. Burns was happier in his par- 
entage than Byron, for though a poor unlettered 
farmer William Burness was what Captain Byron 
was not — a gentleman. 

The parentage of Burns may, and I think does, 
explain his personality, but it does not explain his 
poetry, for, whatever the genius of a writer, his 



20 SCOTCH CONTEMPOKAKIES OF BTJKNS 

writing is never wholly shaped by his genius, is sel- 
dom, indeed, as much shaped by it as by the books 
he is known to have read while it was undergoing 
the process of formation and development. We know 
little or nothing of the quality that we call genius 
except that it is a mysterious and glorious gift, and 
that it discovers itself only through sympathy with 
its kind, love of pictures creating painters, love 
of music creating musicians, and love of poetry 
poets. The beginning of art is imitation, and un- 
less the artist have genius, imitation is its end. 
Only the great surpass their masters, and become 
great in turn. We know through his biographers 
the books which Burns read in his childhood and 
youth, but not the order in which he read them, for 
in the list which they furnish us they huddle verse 
and prose together without regard to chronology. 
Some of these books appear to have belonged to his 
father, while others were borrowed from neighbors ; 
knowing the bent of the paternal mind it is safe to 
assume that the former were theological ones, and 
knowing the bent of the filial mind it is equally safe 
to assume that the latter were poetical ones, fore- 
most among which were Allan Ramsay and Robert 
Ferguson. 

Ramsay, who died about a year before Burns was 
born, was the most famous Scottish poet of the 
period ; for whatever the native literati thought of 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 21 

him, and for national reasons they probably thought 
well of him, there can be no doubt that he was 
greatly admired by the people, among whom The 
Gentle Shepherd was a classic. Its subject was 
one which appealed to their sympathies, dealing, as 
it did, with a condition of rustic life that they were 
familiar with, and its poetic form was better adapted 
to their comprehension than any other that could 
have been given to it. No book-learning was neces- 
sary for it, as for Shakespeare and Milton, Addison 
and Pope. It was written in their native speech, 
their daily dialect, and was understanded by all. 
Burns must have read The Gentle Shepherd, in 
his copy of Bamsay, and he doubtless read Kam- 
say's acknowledged contributions to The Tea-Table 
Miscellany, a notable anthology, which was as im- 
portant in the history of Scottish poetry as Percy's 
Reliques, forty-one years later, in the history of 
English poetry. Of Ferguson little can be said ex- 
cept that he made upward of a hundred indifferent 
poems, some in what he considered the English lan- 
guage, others in the Scotch tongue ; that he was 
bibulous and pious ; and that he died in a mad- 
house when Burns was fifteen. Ferguson and Bam- 
say were the masters of Burns. Before we can de- 
termine what they were to him we must look into 
their writings, and read at least a portion of them. 
What first strikes us in this readme; is that both 



22 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

strove to write English verse, after the received 
models, Pope, Addison, Prior, and the nambypam- 
by manufacturers of artificial pastorals in insipid 
heroics, and strove in vain. They learned nothing 
from the English poets except to write worse than 
the worst of them. The next thing that strikes one 
in this reading is the wonderment that they should 
have been considered poets when they wrote in the 
dialect of their own countrymen, which, poetical in 
a certain sense in their old songs, is prosaic in their 
inharmonious mouths. We need not be Scotch by 
birth to know whether Scotch verse is good or bad, 
for, like all dialect verse, Dorsetshire, Lancashire, 
Yorkshire, it authenticates itself, if it be poetry. 
We recognize and value what is said, if anything be 
said, in proportion to its veracity, without regard to 
the idiom in which this veracity is expressed. The 
touch of nature that makes the whole world kin is 
as sure in dialect as in the literary language. 

Reading the verse of Burns in the order in which 
it was written, his first source of inspiration appears 
to have been the collection of songs in two vol- 
umes, called The Lark, and his second Ramsay and 
Ferguson, in the first of whom he found the four- 
teen-line stanza in which he cast his first Epistle 
to Davie, and the nine-line stanza with a refrain 
in which he cast his Hallowe'en, and in both of 
whom he found the six-line stanza in which he cast 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 23 

his Epistles to Eankine, Lapraik, Goudie, Simp- 
son, Death and Dr. Hornbook, and other poems 
of the Mossgiel period which will recur to his 
readers. To these two — the younger a thirsty at- 
torney's clerk, and the elder a canny wig-maker — he 
owed these forms of verse, the spirit of which was 
his own ; how glorious and supremely his own may 
be seen from a comparison of Ferguson's Hallow- 
fair and Farmer's Ingle with his Hallowe'en and 
Cotter's Saturday Night. They revealed him to 
himself, which was all they could do, or any mas- 
ter can do to any scholar. He read them wisely 
for they taught him all they had to teach, more 
wisely than the English poets and prose writers, 
who stimulated and baffled his ambition. 

The genius of Burns differed from the genius of 
any other British poet of equal eminence in that it 
was incapable of education beyond a certain stage. 
He read as many books as came in his way in his 
narrow and laborious life, but except those which 
ministered to and nurtured his natural gifts he read 
them in vain. Nothing in any English poet that he 
is known to have read was instructive or suggestive 
to him. He mastered no English measure, unless 
he may be allowed to have mastered the Spenserian 
in The Cotter's Saturday Night, and whenever he 
attempted to write in English measures, outside of 
balladry, his vocabulary was poor and prosaic. His 



24 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

English poetry was puerile. His English prose — 
which consists of the Preface to the Kilmarnock and 
the Dedication to the Edinburgh editions of his 
poems, and a great many letters to all sorts of peo- 
ple — reads as if it cost him a world of pains in the 
writing. It lacks simplicity and directness, and 
though often forcible is always ambitious and 
strained. His letters were probably modelled after 
a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's 
time which was known to have been in his posses- 
sion, and in which Pope must have figured largely, 
and a worse collection could not possibly have 
fallen into his hands. That he was dazzled by 
its spangles of sentiment and captivated by its 
rhetorical rhodomontade is evident in the epistles 
that he as Sylvander addressed to Mrs. M'Lehose 
as Clarinda, and in which he fooled her to the 
top of her bent. This correspondence was a silly 
performance, and a cruel one, for the poor woman 
believed to the day of her death that he really loved 
her. 

The impression which I have formed of Burns 
after reading him for years, and comparing him with 
other poets of earlier and later date, is that no Brit- 
ish poet ever owed so much to his own genius and 
so little to the genius or talents of others ; or, to put 
it differently, so little to books. Tolerably read for 
a man in his station, he had no conception of litera- 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 25 

ture as literature ; his mind was vigorous, and his 
gifts were great, but he was not literate. He held 
his own among the great at Edinburgh — among the 
literati, the professors, the judges, the lords, and 
ladies — not by virtue of what he knew, but of what 
he was. " The attentions he received during his 
stay in town," said Dugald Stewart to Dr. Currie, 
"from all ranks and descriptions of persons, was 
such as would have turned any head but his own. 
I cannot say that I could perceive any unfavorable ef- 
fect which they left upon his mind. He retained the 
same simplicity of manners and appearance which 
had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in 
the country ; nor did he seem to feel any additional 
self-importance from the number and rank of his 
new acquaintance." The character of Burns was 
more thoroughly tested by his environments than 
that of any poet with whose life I am familiar; 
for whatever these environments were, and however 
differently he appeared at different periods, he was 
always the same simple, manly, independent man — 
always conscious of his powers, though he never as- 
serted them offensively, for he was so far from under- 
standing that he undervalued them in comparison 
with the powers of others. He underrated himself 
when he spoke of Eamsay and Ferguson, and when 
he called Sillar and Lapraik his brother poets. He 
was generous to his inferiors, more generous than 



26 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

he probably would have been if he could have 
measured them by a literary standard ; and his 
generosity was hurtful to them, and to the on- 
coming school of dialect versifiers which they mis- 
represent, and which should have been killed, not 
scotched. 

The first poetic recruit that flocked to the stand- 
ard of Burns after the enlistment of his cronies, 
Sillar and Lapraik, was William Simpson. The el- 
dest son of a farmer in Ten-pound Land, near Ochil- 
tree, Simpson studied for the ministry, but not 
reaching that sacred destination to which so many 
ambitious young rustics were rushing pell-mell, he 
accepted a position as teacher in the parish school, 
and, before his acquaintance with Burns, was school- 
master at Ochiltree. The acquaintance itself was 
made through a copy of Burns's satirical poem, 
The Twa Herds, which, circulating about the coun- 
try in manuscript, fell into the hands of Patrick 
Simpson, by whom it was shown to his brother 
William, who admired its clever local hits, and tes- 
tified his admiration in a rhymed letter to its writer, 
for, like Lapraik and Sillar, Simpson was also a 
brother poet. Burns acknowledged the compliment 
in an epistle to Simpson, which was written in the 
month following his second epistle to Lapraik, 
which it surpassed in poetic feeling and love of nat- 
ure. It was in his happiest vein, and it contained 



SCOTCH CONTEMPOKAKIES OF BUENS 27 

one glorious stanza, which is as true now as it was 
then : 

The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, 
Till by himsel he learned 'to wander 
Adown some trotting burn's meander, 

And no think lang ; 
O sweet, to stray and pensive ponder 

A heart-felt sang ! 

The bard of Mossgiel and the dominie of Ochil- 
tree became personal as well as poetical friends, and 
remained such until 1788, when the latter removed 
to Cumnock, where, by plying the ferule freely, he 
taught the young idea how to shoot until well on in 
the present century. His friendship with Burns 
reached the ears of one of his acquaintances, who was 
emulous of enjoying the same honor. His name was 
Thomas Walker ; he lived at a place called Poole, 
not far from Ochiltree, and he was a tailor. But he 
was cut out for better things, in his own opinion, and 
fitted to wield the quill as well as the shears. He 
courted the Muse, and sat down one day, like his 
friend Simpson, or rather rose up, for sitting was 
his customary position, and composed an epistle to 
Burns. He despatched it by post to Mossgiel, 
where it was no doubt received, but its receipt was 
not acknowledged, either because the receiver was 
not in the vein to answer it, or was busy with more 
important work. He waited several weeks, and, 



28 SCOTCH CONTEMPOKAEIES OF BUKNS 

not hearing from Burns, went in chagrin to Simp- 
son, to whom he had read this effusion, and com- 
plained of his neglect. Simpson sympathized and 
condoled with him, and, seeing an opportunity for a 
joke at his expense, wrote a reply himself, and sent 
it to him with the signature of Burns attached to it. 
Elated by this fictitious honor, Walker proceeded to 
Ochiltree and showed it to Simpson, who found it 
difficult to preserve his gravity. He did so, however, 
and to the day of his death the credulous tailor was 
not undeceived. Meeting Burns not long afterward, 
Simpson informed him of the liberty he had taken 
with his name. "You did well," he said, with a 
laugh; "for you thrashed the tailor much better 
than I could have done." "We have the epistle of 
Walker, and the reply of Simpson, both of which 
appeared in some of the early editions of Burns 
among his genuine productions, and they are not 
bad of their kind, much better, indeed, than any- 
thing in the volumes of Sillar and Lapraik. 

The next member of the awkward squad, who 
formed a sort of poetic body-guard to Burns, was 
Miss Janet Little, who may be considered its Jille du 
regiment. The daughter of George Little, of Nether 
Bogside, near Ecclefechan, in Dumfries - shire, she 
was born in the same year as Burns, and in so hum- 
ble a position that when she was old enough she went 
out to service, first as a nursery-maid in the house 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 29 

of a clergyman named Johnstone, later in the family 
of Mrs. Dunlop, whose acquaintance was made by 
Burns on the eve of his departure for Edinburgh, 
after the success of his Kilmarnock volume, and 
later still, with Mrs. Hendrie, of the Dunlop ilk, 
who rented Loudoun Castle, where she took charge 
of the dairy. While engaged in this useful but 
menial capacity she penned, in the summer of 1789, 
a letter to Burns, whose fame as a poet was by this 
time familiar to most of his countrymen and country- 
women. Her letter, which has been preserved, was 
as follows : " Sik : Though I have not the happi- 
ness of being personally acquainted with you, yet, 
amongst the number of those who have read and 
admired your publications, I may be permitted to 
trouble you with this. You must know, sir, I am 
somewhat in love with the Muses, though I cannot 
boast of any favors they have deigned to confer 
upon me as yet ; my situation in life has been very 
much against me as to that. I have spent some 
years in and about Ecclefechan (where my parents 
reside) in the station of a servant, and am now 
come to Loudoun House, at present possessed by 
Mrs. Hendrie ; she is the daughter to Mrs. Dunlop 
of Dunlop, whom I understand you are particularly 
acquainted with. As I had the pleasure of perusing 
your poems, I felt a partiality for the author, which 
I should not have experienced had you been in a 



30 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

more dignified station. I wrote a few verses of ad- 
dress to you, which I did not think of ever present- 
ing ; but as fortune seems to have favored me in 
this, by bringing me into a family by whom you 
are so well known and so much esteemed, and 
where, perhaps, I may have an opportunity of see- 
ing you, I shall, in hopes of your future friendship, 
take the liberty to transcribe them." 

Miss Little transcribed her verses, which were 
written in the six-line stanza, common among the 
Scottish poets in their rhymed epistles, and were 
womanly and sensible. About two months later 
Burns acknowledged them in a letter to Mrs. Dun- 
lop. He had heard of Miss Little and her composi- 
tions, and, he was happy to add, always to the honor 
of her character ; but he knew not how to write to 
her. " I should sit down to a sheet of paper that I 
knew not how to stain." Whether he ever wrote to 
her may be doubted. They met, however, about a 
year and a half afterward, when she made a visit to 
Dumfries-shire, partly to see her relatives, but more, 
it would seem, for the purpose of seeing 

The pride o' a' our Scottish plain. 

She called at Ellisland, and found to her regret 
that he was absent on his Excise duties, though he 
was soon expected back. While she was waiting 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 31 

his return he was brought home in a disabled state, 
his horse Pegasus had fallen with him, and broken 
his right arm. Her poetic pilgrimage and his 
unfortunate conclusion iD spired a poem in eight 
stanzas, of which three will probably be sufficient 
here : 

Hark ! now he comes, a dire alarm 

Re-echoes through his hall ; 
Pegasus kneeled, his rider's arm 

Was broken by a fall. 

The doleful tidings to my ears 

Were in harsh notes conveyed ; 
His lovely wife stood drowned in tears, 

While thus I pondering said : 

No cheering draught, with ills unmixed, 

Can mortals taste below ; 
All human fate by Heaven is fixed, 

Alternate joy and woe. 

The poetess of Loudoun House followed the ex- 
ample of Sillar and Lapraik, but with more success ; 
for her subscription list was filled with illustrious 
names, not merely from the neighborhood, but 
throughout the country, and in 1792, the year after 
her visit to Burns, there appeared, from the press of 
the Wilsons of Ayr, The Poetical Works of Janet 
Little, the Scottish Milkmaid. After the depart- 
ure of her mistress from Loudoun House she mar- 



32 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

ried John Richmond, an elderly man, who had kmg 
been employed there as a laborer, to whose chil- 
dren, for he was a widower, she was a kindly mother. 
She outlived Burns nearly seventeen years, and, 
dying in the winter of 1813, was interred in the 
burying-place of the Loudoun family. Such was 
Janet Little, the fifth, but not the last, of the poetic 
contemporaries of Burns. 



m. 



To say that no poet can be thoroughly understood 
until his life is thoroughly understood is so evident 
a truism that it should go without saying ; but, un- 
fortunately, it does not, for out of a thousand read- 
ers of any poet whose reputation is acknowledged 
there are not fifty who are acquainted with his per- 
sonal history, and out of this fifty not five who are 
capable of determining how far it went to the mak- 
ing or marring of his character. It is not difficult, 
or ought not to be difficult in this critical age, for a 
lover of poetry to tell why he loves it in the abstract, 
nor why of its concrete forms he loves one form 
more than another ; why the poetry of Keats, say, is 
more to him than the poetry of Byron, or why the 
poetry of Tennyson is more to him than the poetry 
of Wordsworth. Poetry is not read now as it was 
in the days of Pope and Dryden, for what it stated 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 33 

in ethics, in politics, and whatever else concerns the 
material well-being of man, but for what it suggests 
to his spiritual perception. The eighteenth century 
did not accept poetry unless it proved something ; 
the nineteenth century accepts it if it proves itself. 
Why the verse of some poets, which is good up to a 
certain point, is not good beyond that point, is a 
question which most thoughtful readers of their 
verse often ask themselves, and to which the biogra- 
phies of these poets afford the only satisfactory 
answer. They were greatly gifted, but they were 
not great. Why did not the seeds which were 
sown so plentifully in their genius ripen and bear 
an abundant harvest ? 

I have been reading the life of Burns lately more 
closely than ever before ; and I think I understand 
as never before some of the causes of the striking- 
inequality in his verse. I find one in the paucity 
of his early reading, and in the nature of that read- 
ing, which, when not theological, was certainly not 
imaginative, and I find another in the personality 
of his early friends, which was not of a kind to ele- 
vate his own. It was his misfortune to know men 
and women who were inferior to himself, more in- 
ferior than he divined, for his estimate of himself 
was a modest one, while his gratitude at being 
recognized deceived him as to the value of the 
recognition. Sillar and Lapraik were well enough 



34 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

in their way, the one to converse with in his Sunday 
rambles across the fields at Mossgiel, the other to 
drink a pint of ale with at Mauchline Fair, or 
something stronger at his home in Muirsmill, but 
they were not men from whom he could learn any- 
thing that he needed to know. What he learned 
from his Peggy Thomsons and Eliza Begbies he 
did not need to know, since it was already at the 
tip of his winning tongue. 

We have several descriptions of Burns at different 
periods, but one above all others which to my mind 
authenticates itself as a faithful portrait. It is 
from the pen of an English man of letters, who, 
writing in many ways all his life, which was a long 
one, sought at first to distinguish himself as a 
poet. Of good family and well educated, about 
three years younger than Burns, Samuel Eger- 
ton Brydges published his first collection of verse 
nearly a year and a half before Burns published 
his Kilmarnock volume. It resembled the average 
poetry of the period, which had not shaken off the 
feeble fetters of the followers of Pope, though it 
was struggling toward the freedom which was soon 
to be given it by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and 
of which the most promising sign was its return 
to the cultivation of sonnetry. Brydges was a bet- 
ter sonneteer than Charlotte Smith, who appeared 
a year before him, and William Lisle Bowles, who 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 35 

appeared four years after him, not only because 
he preserved the legitimate form of the sonnet, 
which they neglected, but because the spirit of his 
sonnets was more perfect than the spirit of theirs, 
each beiDg in itself a harmonious whole, a unit in 
feeling and expression ; and one of his sonnets, 
which was contained in his first collection (On 
Echo and Silence), has outlived all the books that 
he wrote and edited. He was not a poet, notwith- 
standing the beauty of this sonnet, but he knew 
what poetry was ; for besides his scholarship he 
possessed a sensitive, impressionable temperament, 
and he greatly admired the poetry of Burns, to 
whom, while he was living at Ellisland, he bore a 
letter of introduction, in the autumn of 1790. 

He seems at first to have feared that his visit 
might be ill received, for he had heard that Burns 
was a moody person, and difficult to deal with ; but 
he summoned up courage, and proceeded cau- 
tiously. But he shall tell his own story: "About 
a mile from his residence, on a bench under a tree, 
I passed a figure which, from the engraved por- 
traits of him, I did not doubt was the poet ; but I 
did not venture to address him. On arriving at his 
humble cottage, Mrs. Burns opened the door ; she 
was the plain sort of humble woman she has been 
described. She ushered me into a neat apartment, 
and said that she would send for Burns, who had 



36 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

gone for a walk. In about half an hour he came, 
and my conjecture proved right ; he was the person 
I had seen on the bench by the roadside. At first 
I was not entirely pleased with his countenance. I 
thought it had a sort of capricious jealousy, as if he 
was half inclined to treat me as an intruder. I re- 
solved to bear it, and try if I could humor him. I 
let him choose his turn of conversation, but said a 
word about the friend whose letter I had brought 
to him. It was now about four in the afternoon 
of an autumn day. While we were talking, Mrs. 
Burns, as if accustomed to entertain visitors in this 
way, brought in a bottle of Scotch whiskey, and set 
the table. I accepted this hospitality. I could not 
help observing the curious glance with which he 
watched me at the entrance of this sequel of homely 
entertainment. He was satisfied ; he filled our 
glasses. ' Here's a health to auld Caledonia ! ' 
The fire sparkled in his eye, and mine sympatheti- 
cally met his. He shook my hands, and we were 
friends at once. Then he drank ' Erin forever ! ' 
and the tear of delight burst from his eye. The 
fountain of his mind and his heart opened at once, 
and flowed with abundant force almost till mid- 
night. He had amazing acuteness of intellect as 
well as glow of sentiment ; I do not deny that he 
said some absurd things, and many coarse ones, 
and that his knowledge was very irregular, and 



SCOTCH CONTEMPOKAKIES OP BUENS 37 

sometimes too presumptuous, and that he did not 
endure contradiction with sufficient patience. His 
pride, and perhaps his vanity, was even morbid. I 
carefully avoided topics in which he could not take 
an active part. Of literary gossip he knew nothing, 
and, therefore, I kept aloof from it ; in the tech- 
nical parts of literature, his opinions were crude 
and unformed ; but whenever he spoke of a great 
writer whom he had read, his taste was generally 
sound. To a few minor writers he gave more 
credit than they deserved. His great beauty was 
his manly strength, and his energy and elevation of 
thought and feeling. He had always a full mind, 
and all flowed from a genuine spring. I never con- 
versed with a man who appeared to be more warmly 
impressed with the beauties of Nature ; and visions 
of female beauty and tenderness seemed to trans- 
port him. He did not merely appear to be a poet 
at casual intervals, but at every moment a poetical 
enthusiasm seemed to beat in his veins ; and he 
lived all his days the inward if not the outward 
life of a poet. I thought I perceived in Burns's 
cheek the symptoms of an energy which had been 
pushed too far ; and he had this feeling him- 
self. Every now and then he spoke of the grave 
so soon about to close over him. His dark eye 
had at first a character of sternness ; but as he 
became warmed, though this did not entirely melt 



38 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

away, it was mingled with changes of extreme soft- 
ness." 

This delineation of Burns in his thirty-second 
year is not only a notable example of intellectual 
portraiture, but to those who have studied his 
writings is an acute analysis of his genius, which 
accomplished what it did through its own intensity 
and not through the adventitious aid of books. 
That his knowledge was very irregular, as his visitor 
could not but feel, was not so surprising as that he 
succeeded in acquiring any knowledge ; nor was it 
surprising that his opinions concerning the literary 
art were crude and. unformed. His familiarity with 
great writers was not extensive enough to instruct 
him ; he was misinstructed by minor writers, with 
whom his acquaintance was sufficiently large. He 
read without judgment, and admired without taste. 
This circumstance explains the mediocrity which 
characterizes all his English writings, and explains 
at the same time the good-natured favor which he 
wasted upon indifferent writers, particularly when 
they happened to be his brother and sister poets ; 
for the sisterhood of singers was represented by 
others than the Scottish milkmaid. 

One of these singers was Jeanie Glover, who was 
born at Kilmarnock about three months before 
Burns, of what the patronizing biographers of the 
last century designated poor but honest parents. 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 39 

She was brought up in the principles of rectitude, 
we are told, and had the advantages of that early 
education which few Scottish families are without. 
But unfortunately for those advantages and princi- 
ples, she was beautiful in face and person, and knew 
it, and was a fine singer, and knew that also ; so 
one day, when a company of strolling players came 
to Kilmarnock, she became stage-struck, and, elop- 
ing with one of them named Kichard, led a life of 
ups and downs, playing at fairs, in booths, and the 
large rooms of public-houses, one of which houses 
at Muirkirk was appropriately called the Black 
Bottle. Failing to attain eminence in the legitim- 
ate drama, Kichard courted public favor as a con- 
jurer, and, while he exercised his sleight-of-hand 
tricks, Jeanie, attired in her cheap finery, sang and 
played the tambourine close by. When Burns 
knew her her character was not of a kind that ladies 
covet, and to her other accomplishments she added 
the reputation of a thief, in which capacity she 
visited most of the correction-houses in the west of 
Scotland. But whatever Jeanie may have been, she 
was a poet, if she composed, as Burns believed she 
did, a song which he took down from her singing 
as she was strolling through the country with her 
sleight-of-hand blackguard, and sent to Johnson's 
Scots Museum, where, as in most later miscella- 
nies of the sort, it may be found. It is a pretty 



40 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

trifle, fresh in feeling and simple in expression, 
with a refrain or chorus that sings itself : 

O'er the moor amang the heather, 
O'er the moor amang the heather, 
There I met a honnie lassie, 
Keeping a' her yowes tegether. 

She outlived Burns about five years, dying in the 
town of Letterkenny, in Ireland, and where a sol- 
dier, who had heard her sing in Croft Lodge, in 
Kilmarnock, had the honor of her company over a 
social glass. Such was Jeanie Glover. 

Another of these singers was Isobel Pagan, who 
was born a year or two after Burns. She was not a 
comely person, like Miss Glover, for she squinted 
with one of her eyes, and was deformed in one foot 
so as to require crutches in walking. Of her early 
years nothing is known, except what she has related 
of herself in one of her poems, and, as it is not par- 
ticularly to her credit, it may probably be depended 
upon. It runs as follows : 

I was horn near four miles from Nithhead, 

Where fourteen years I got my oread ; 

My learning it can soon be told, 

Ten weeks, when I was seven years old, 

With a good, old religious wife, 

Who lived a quiet and sober life ; 



SCOTCH CONTEMPOEAEIES OF BUENS 41 

Indeed, she took of me more pains 
Than some does now of forty bairns. 
With my attention and her skill, 
I read the Bible no that ill ; 
And when I grew a wee thought mair, 
I read when I had time to spare ; 
But a' the whole tract of my time 
I found myself inclined to rhyme ; 
When I see merry company, 
I sing a song with mirth and glee, 
And sometimes I the whisky pree, 
But 'deed it's best to let it be. 

But let it be was what Isobel never did for any 
length of time, for, having wit, high spirits, and an 
excellent voice, she was noted for her conviviality. 
She lived for many years in the neighborhood of 
Muirkirk, at first in a cottage at Muirsmill, and af- 
terward in another, which was given to her by Ad- 
miral Keith Stewart. It stood on the banks of the 
Gapal Water, and was constructed out of a low arch 
which was originally built for a brick store. Here 
she lived alone, taking care of herself as well as she 
could, for, despite her lameness, which prevented 
her from work, her relations did nothing for her ; 
but she had, if not friends, certainly companions, 
who night after night frequented her cottage, and 
made its vaulted roof ring with their revelry. What 
these nodes of Isobel's were we may imagine after 
reading Burns's cantata of The Jolly Beggars, the 



42 SCOTCH CONTEMPO BABIES OF BURNS 

scene of which might well have been laid at her 
cottage, though it was really laid, I believe, at the 
lodging-house of Poosie Nansie, in Mauchline. Iso- 
bel was famous throughout the country-side for her 
singing, her biting sarcasms, and her supply of 
spirits ; for though she had no license to sell them, 
she always contrived to find a bottle for her cus- 
tomers, who were not confined to people of her sort, 
but embraced in summer what was then called the 
gentry, who came from all quarters to the moors of 
Muirkirk for grouse shooting. Sometimes they sent 
for her, that they might hear her songs and ribald 
jests, and, after rewarding her with a little money, 
left her late at night to find her unsteady way home. 
It was a piece of brutality on their part ; but in cen- 
suring it, as we must, we should remember that the 
age in which they were living was a brutal one, 
when inebriety was the rule and not the exception, 
and when the commonalty were expected to min- 
ister to the mirth of the quality. Furthermore, 

Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
As well as by want of heart. 

But no hand save the one that penned the history of 
Moll Flanders, could do justice to the career of 
Isobel Pagan, so I shall not attempt it, for realism, 
as we understand it now, avoids the description of 



SCOTCH COOTEMPORAKIES OF BUENS 43 

frailties like hers. She published her poems about 
ten years after the death of Burns, and they are not 
bad of their unlettered kind. They were not written 
by herself, for, though she could read, she could not 
write, but were taken down from her recitation by 
a tailor, whom she pressed into her service, as an 
amanuensis, and who may have softened some of her 
coarse touches. The best of them is a rustic love 
song, in six stanzas, of which the following is the 
first : 

Ca' the yowes to tlie knowes, 
Ca' them where the heather grows, 
Ca' them, where the burnie bows, 
My bonnie dearie. 

She died in the fall of 1821, in her eightieth year, 
and was buried in a heavy storm, in the churchyard 
at Muirkirk, where a stone was erected over her 
grave. 

Another of these singers was Gavin Turnbull, 
whose early years were spent in Kilmarnock, where 
he and his father, whom the townspeople called 
Tommy Tumble, used to pass their days together 
in tippling-houses. Poetry and poverty went hand 
in hand with young Master Gavin, as with good old 
Thomas Churchyard, for while in Kilmarnock he 
lived alone in a small garret without any furniture. 
" The bed on which he lay was entirely composed of 



44 SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURNS 

straw, with the exception of an old patched covering 
which he threw over him during the night. He had 
no chair to sit upon. A cold stone placed by the 
fire served him as such ; and the sill of a small win- 
dow at one end of the room was all he had for a 
table, from which to take his food, or on which to 
write his verses. A tin kettle and a spoon were all 
his cooking utensils ; and, when he prepared a meal 
for himself, he used the lid of the kettle instead of 
a bowl." But he did not heed these discomforts, 
for he was a poet, and so long as he could procure 
pens, ink, and paper, he was happy. The success 
of Burns, which turned the heads of so many bard- 
lings, impelled him to issue his Poetical Essays 
in the same year that Lapraik issued his Poems on 
Several Occasions (1788), the pair preceding by a 
year their brother poet Sillar in his clutch after the 
laurel. Of the three Turnbull was the best edu- 
cated, at least in English verse, which he wrote like 
the celebrated Person of Quality, his model being 
Thurston, who still held a place among the Eng- 
lish poets. From Kilmarnock Turnbull removed to 
Dumfries, where his book was published, where he 
became a comedian, and where he knew Burns (who, 
however, may have made his acquaintance before), 
who, in writing to Mr. George Thomson, of Edin- 
burgh, in October, 1793, spoke of Turnbull as an 
old friend and copied in his letter three of Turn- 



SCOTCH CONTEMPORARIES OF BURN'S 45 

bull's unpublished poems, in the hope that they 
might suit his collection of melodies. He liked 
some of his pieces very much, he said, and one which 
he liked was this conventional little song : 

The Nightingale. 

Thou sweetest minstrel of the grove y 
That ever tried the plaintive strain, 

Awake thy tender tale of love, 

And soothe a poor forsaken swain. 

For though the muses deign to aid, 
And teach him smoothly to complain ; 

Yet Delia, charming, cruel maid, 
Is deaf to her forsaken swain. 

All day, with fashion's gaudy sons, 
In sport she wanders o'er the plain ; 

Their tales approves, and still she shuns 
The notes of her forsaken swain. 

When evening shades obscure the sky, 
And bring the solemn hours again, 

Begin, sweet bird, thy melody, 
And soothe a poor forsaken swain. 

Turnbull is supposed to have emigrated to Amer- 
ica, and to have died here, which is all that is known 
about him, and much more than would have been 
known if he had not happened to be a friend of 
Burns, who, in his case certainly, gave more credit 
to a minor writer than he deserved. 



JAMES HOGG 

(THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD) 

To what extent the verse of certain poets should 
be regarded as the outgrowth of their personality, 
and to what extent it should be regarded as the 
manifestation of their surroundings, is a question 
which we cannot help asking ourselves, if we are at 
all given to critical consideration, and one which we 
find it difficult to answer. There are qualities in 
the verse of every genuine poet which we feel to be 
eminently characteristic, individual to, and distinc- 
tive of, that poet and no other ; and there are other 
qualities which pertain — if not to his heredity, to 
his nativity, to the conditions of life in which he 
belonged, and to his period. Shakespeare could 
not have been the greatest English dramatic poet if 
he had not lived in the greatest age of the English 
drama. That he would have been a great writer in 
any age cannot be doubted, his literary power was 
so enormous ; but in an age like this, where the 
drama is not, and the novel is, he would not have 
been a dramatist, he would have been a novelist. 



JAMES HOGG 47 

If Byron were living now, tie would probably be the 
poet that he was, his vitality was so intense, and his 
audacity so daring ; but he would hardly write 
satires, since no one cares to read them. That 
Burns would be to-day the poet that he was a hun- 
dred years ago, I do not believe — not so much be- 
cause he was the poet of his period, which he cer- 
tainly was not, in a large sense, as because he was 
the poet of his day and neighborhood. No such 
poet as Burns is possible in the last half of the 
nineteenth century, not even in his stern and rugged 
land, which happily is not what it once was when 
he was born. His genius was not imperial, like 
Shakespeare's, nor patrician, like Byron's, but ple- 
beian, of the people from whom he sprang, and for 
the people to whom he sang. He sang because 
they sang ; no people ever had such songs as theirs; 
and his songs, for what they are, are what the plays 
of Shakespeare are. That his countrymen admired 
him is not to be wondered at, his note is so true 
and his range is so large, nor that they should have 
worshipped his memory since his death. What is 
to be wondered at is the alacrity with which they 
welcomed his successors, the best of whom was not 
worthy to undo the latchet of his shoe. He was 
learned beside them, they were so ignorant, and 
abstemious when compared with most, they were 
so bibulous. They were a curious lot ; but one of 



48 JAMES HOGG 

the most curious, James Hogg, was not without the 
rudiments of genius. 

The story of Hogg's life is an instructive and 
amusing chapter in the curiosities of literature. It 
is instructive as showing how little circumstances 
count in the genesis of a poet, and amusing as 
showing what a poet is in his natural state. It has 
interested many, but none so much as Hogg him- 
self. "I like to write about myself," he said ; "in 
fact there are few things which I like better." He 
might have said that there was nothing which he 
liked better ; for he wrote, or re-wrote, four auto- 
biographies, all of which were entertaining, and none 
of which was accurate. He began, for example, by 
misstating the date of bis birth, which was not Jan- 
uary 25, 1772, but toward the close of 1770, prob- 
ably in December, on the 9th of which he was bap- 
tized. He was born at Ettrick, the second of four 
sons by the same father and mother, Robert Hogg 
and Margaret Laidlaw. His father was a shep- 
herd, who, having at his marriage saved what, for a 
man in his condition, was a considerable sum of 
money, took a lease of the farms of Ettrick House 
and Ettrick Hall. He began dealing in sheep, great 
numbers of which he bought up and drove to Eng- 
lish and Scottish markets ; but owing to a fall in 
their price, and the absconding of his principal 
debtor, he was ruined. He became bankrupt ; 



JAMES HOGG 49 

everything that he possessed was sold at auction, 
and he and his family were turned out of doors 
without a farthing. This calamity excited the com- 
passion of a worthy man, a Mr. Brydon, of Crosslee, 
who took a short lease of the farm of Ettrick House, 
and placed its former master there as his shepherd, 
thereby enabling him to support his family for a 
time. It could not have been for long, however ; 
for when James was seven years old he was obliged 
to go out to service, and was hired by a farmer in 
the neighborhood to herd a few cows. Here the 
lad stripped off his clothes, and ran races against 
time, or rather against himself, for he first lost his 
plaid, then his bonnet, then his coat, and, last of all, 
his hosen, for shoes as yet he had none. He herded 
his cows in a naked state for several days, until a 
shepherd and a maid- servant, who were sent to the 
hills to look for them, found his clothes, and reha- 
bilitated him. 

He was taken home during the following winter 
by his parents, and put to school to a lad who 
taught the children of a farmer near by, under 
whom he got into the class that read the Bible. 
He also practised penmanship, in which he suc- 
ceeded in a large way, his letters being nearly an 
inch in length ! When spring came he returned to 
herding the cows, and in summer was sent to a 
height called Broadheads, with a rosy-cheeked lass, 
4 



50 JAMES HOGG 

to herd, in addition to his cows, a flock of newly 
weaned lambs. As the lass had no dog, and he 
had an excellent one, he was ordered to keep 
close by her, an order which he willingly obeyed. 
He herded the lambs and the cows, while she, 
having nothing to do, sat and sewed. They dined 
together at a little well, and after dinner he laid 
his head on her lap, covered her bare feet with 
his plaid, and pretended to fall sound asleep. 
One day he heard her say, " Puir laddie, he's juist 
tired to death." Then he wept until he was afraid 
she would feel the warm tears trickling on her 
knee. 

He could not have been a very desirable farmer's 
boy ; for by the time he was fifteen he had served 
a dozen masters, from some of whom he received 
very hard usage, particularly one shepherd, in whose 
service he was nearly exhausted with hunger and 
fatigue. Every pittance of the wages he earned he 
carried to his parents, who supplied him with 
clothes, his stock of which was so small that he was 
generally bare of shirts, so bare that time after time 
he had but two, which grew so bad at last that he 
ceased wearing them at all. When he was fourteen 
he saved five shillings out of his wages and bought 
an old violin, on which, when not too tired, he used 
to spend an hour or two every night in sawing out 
old Scotch tunes, which, as his bed was always in 



JAMES HOGG 51 

stables or cow-houses, disturbed nobody but himself 
and his associate quadrupeds. 

At the age of twenty, he hired himself as a shep- 
herd to a Mr. Laidlaw, at Black House, where his 
reading may be said to have begun. His first books 
were The Adventures of Sir William Wallace and 
The Gentle Shepherd, both of which delighted 
him, though he could not help regretting that they 
were not in prose, so that everybody might under- 
stand them. He made but small progress with 
them, for, strange to say, he was confounded by the 
dialect and the metre, so much so by the last that 
before he got to the end of the second line he gen- 
erally lost the rhyme of the first ; and when he came 
to a triplet, a thing of which he had no conception, 
he read to the foot of the page without perceiving 
that he had entirely lost the rhyme. But if he was 
not apt at reading, he was still less apt at writing ; 
for being obliged about this time to write a letter 
to his elder brother, he found that he had forgotten 
how to make certain letters of the alphabet, which 
he either had to print, or to patch up the words in 
which they occurred in the best way he could with- 
out them. In his twenty-sixth year he began to 
compose songs and ballads ; and a proud man he 
was when he first heard the lasses sing his uncouth 
strains, and call him "Jamie the poeter." He had 
no difficulty in composing them ; but then, the writ- 



52 JAMES HOGG 

ing of them — that was a job ! His method of learn- 
ing to write was to follow the Italian alphabet ; and 
though he always stripped himself of coat and vest 
when he began to pen a song, his wrist took a 
cramp, so that he rarely wrote more than four or 
six lines at a sitting. Having little spare time from 
his flock, which was unruly, he folded and stitched 
a few sheets of paper, which he carried in his pocket. 
He had no inkhorn ; but in place of one he borrowed 
a small vial, which he fixed in a hole in the breast 
of his waistcoat, and having a cork fastened by a 
piece of twine, it answered his purpose as fully as 
an inkhorn. Thus equipped, when a leisure mo- 
ment or two offered, and he had nothing else to do, 
he wrote out his thoughts as he found them. 

He was in his twenty-seventh year before he ever 
heard of Burns, and then it was by chance one sum- 
mer day, when a half-daft man, named John Scott, 
came to him on the hill where he tended his flock, 
and repeated Tarn O'Shanter to him, as he tells 
us in his autobiography : " I was delighted ! I was 
more than delighted — I was ravished ! I cannot 
describe my feelings ; but, in short, before Jock 
Scott left me, I could recite the poem from begin- 
ning to end ; and it has been my favorite poem ever 
since. He told me it was made by one Kobert 
Burns, the sweetest poet that ever was born ; but 
that he was now dead, and his place would never be 



JAMES HOGG 53 

supplied. He told me all about him, how he was 
born on January 25th, bred a ploughman, how many 
beautiful songs and poems he had composed, and 
that he had died last harvest on August 21st. 
This formed a new epoch in my life. Every day I 
pondered on the genius and fate of Burns. I wept 
and always thought with myself, What is to hinder 
me from succeeding Burns ? I was born on Janu- 
ary 25th, and I have much more time to read and 
compose than any ploughman could have, and can 
sing more old songs than ever ploughman could in 
the world. But then I wept again because I could 
not write. However, I resolved to be a poet, and to 
follow in the steps of Burns." 

The only one of Hogg's early companions who 
saw any merit in his compositions was William 
Laidlaw, the son of his master, who, admiring them 
himself, and showing them to all whom he thought 
capable of admiring them, tried to persuade him to 
revise them, but without success ; for he stood by 
them as they were, though he promised to try 
and write his next pieces better. Laidlaw was an 
important factor in the life of Hogg, for it was 
through his friendship that he was introduced to 
Scott, to whom he was of assistance in furnish- 
ing materials for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish 
Border. But before this introduction took place 
Hogg had left the service of the elder Laidlaw, 



54 JAMES HOGG 

and returned to Ettrick House, which was given up 
to him by his brother, and had composed a song 
which became popular. This was a patriotic effu- 
sion on the threatened invasion of England by Bo- 
naparte, and it was called Donald McDonald, after 
its hero, who proclaimed the valor of his race, to 
the air of Woo'd an' married an' a\ It was first 
sung (it should be remembered that songs were 
often sung then before they were printed, some- 
times before they were written) by Hogg himself to 
a party of his friends at the Crown tavern, in Edin- 
burgh, and was so well received that he offered it to 
one of these friends for a magazine that he edited 
or published. It was said to be too good for that ; 
and he was advised to give it to a Mr. Hamilton, 
who would set it to music and publish it. He fol- 
lowed the advice and returned to Ettrick, where 
from day to day he heard of the popularity of his 
song, though no one knew or cared who wrote it. 
It was sung at a great masonic meeting in Edin- 
burgh before the Earl of Moira, who was so much 
pleased with it that he rose from the chair and des- 
canted in a speech on the utility of such songs at 
that time, thanked the singer, and proffered him his 
whole interest in Scotland. It was also sung at the 
mess-table of a General McDonald, who was proud 
of it, and believed to his dying day that it was 
made upon himself. "Yet neither he nor one of 



JAMES HOGG 55 

his officers ever knew or inquired who was the au- 
thor — so thankless is the poet's trade ! " 
. The popularity of Donald McDonald confirmed 
Hogg in his belief that he was a great poet, and 
projected him into print prematurely. Being now 
the master of Ettrick House, and consequently a 
man of affairs, he attended the Edinburgh market 
one Monday with a number of sheep for sale ; but, 
not selling all of them, he put what remained in a 
park until the market on Wednesday, and, not 
knowing how to pass the time, he resolved to write 
out some of his poems, and have them printed. To 
resolve was to do with him, so he sat down and 
dashed off a lot of his verse (not his best pieces, but 
those that he remembered best), and placed them 
in the hands of a printer, to be set up at his ex- 
pense. This done, he sold the rest of his sheep on 
Wednesday morning, and went back to Ettrick, 
whither, before long, he was followed by the print- 
er's bill, and a thousand copies of his handiwork. 
He was astonished and disgusted, probably at the 
cost, certainly at the result ; for when he compared 
what was in print with what was in his manuscripts, 
he found many stanzas omitted, others misplaced, 
and typographical errors abounding on every page. 
It was a mass of rubbish of which, with all his 
vanity, he was thoroughly ashamed. 

About a year after this rustic escapade into pub- 



56 JAMES HOGG 

licity, when Hogg was at work in the field at Et- 
trick House, one of his servants came and told him 
that a couple of strangers wanted to see him at the 
Ramseycleugh, an inn in the neighborhood, and he 
started toward home to put on his Sunday clothes ; 
but before reaching it he met them. They were his 
friend William Laidlaw and Scott, and they went 
with him to the cottage, where his mother sang for 
them the ballad of Old Maitlan', which delighted 
Scott. Hogg had sent him a copy of it for the 
Minstrelsy, and he feared lest some dread of his 
that a part might be forged was the cause of his 
journey into the wilds of Ettrick ; but he was mis- 
taken, for if Scott had doubted, he was satisfied as 
he listened to the old dame's singing. He asked 
her if she thought the ballad had ever been printed. 
" Oh, na, na, sir, it was never prentit i' the world, 
for my brothers an' me learned it frae auld Andrew 
Moor, an' he learned it, and many mae, frae auld 
Baby Mettlin, that was housekeeper to the first laird 
o' Tushilaw." " Then that must be a very old story, 
indeed, Margaret," said Scott. " Ay, it is that. It 
is an auld story. But mair nor that, except George 
Warton and James Steward, there was never ane o' 
my songs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel', an ye 
hae spoilt them a'thegither. They war made for 
singing, an' no for reading ; an' they're nouther 
right spelled nor right setten down." "Heh-heh- 



JAMES HOGG 57 

heh ! Take ye that, Mr. Scott," said Laicllaw. 
Scott answered by a hearty laugh ; but the old 
woman gave him a rap on the knee with her open 
hand, and said : " It's true enough, for a' that." 
Then the party went to the Kamseycleugh and had 
a merry dinner. 

The lease of Et trick House expiring in the follow- 
ing year, Hogg found himself at the age of thirty- 
three without a home. Scott interested himself in 
his behalf, and, furnished with strong letters of 
recommendation from him, he made an excursion 
into the Highlands in search of employment as an 
overseer on some great sheep farm ; but he re- 
turned to Ettrick without success. The next time 
he went to Edinburgh he waited upon Scott, who 
invited him to dinner at his home in Castle Street, 
with his friend Laidlaw and some other admirers of 
his genius ; and a very queer dinner it must have 
been. But Lockhart shall describe it for us : 
"When Hogg entered the drawing-room, Mrs. 
Scott, being at the time in a delicate state of health, 
was reclining on the sofa. The Shepherd, after 
being presented and making his best bow, forth- 
with took possession of another sofa placed opposite 
to hers, and stretched himself thereupon at all his 
length ; for, as he said afterward, ' I thought I 
could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house.' 
As his dress at this period was precisely that in 



58 JAMES HOGG 

which any ordinary herdsman attends cattle to the 
market, and as his hands, moreover, bore most 
legible marks of a recent sheep-shearing, the lady of 
the house did not observe with perfect equanimity 
the novel usage to which her chintz was exposed. 
The Shepherd, however, remarked nothing of all 
this — dined heartily and drank freely, and, by jest, 
anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment to 
the more civilized part of the company. As the liq- 
uor operated, his familiarity increased and strength- 
ened ; from ' Mr. Scott ' he advanced to ' Shirra,' 
and then to ' Scott,' until, at supper, he fairly con- 
vulsed the whole party by addressing Mrs. Scott as 
'Charlotte.'" 

A suspicion, if not a recollection, of his behavior 
on this occasion dawned upon Hogg after he got 
back to Ettrick, so he penned a letter to Scott — a 
curious letter, which began with an apology and 
ended with a solicitation for aid. He had not been 
satisfied, it seems, with the imitations of old ballads 
in the Minstrelsy, and had, therefore, written a 
number of better imitations himself, which he was 
desirous of having published. Here is his apology : 
" If I was in the state in which I suspect I was, I 
must have spoken a very great deal of nonsense, for 
which I beg ten thousand pardons. I have the con- 
solation, however, of remembering that Mrs. Scott 
kept in company all or most of the time, which she 



JAMES HOGG 59 

certainly could not have done had I been very rude." 
And here is his solicitation : "I have as many songs 
beside me, which are certainly the ivorst of my pro- 
ductions, as will make about one hundred pages 
closely printed, and about two hundred printed as 
the Minstrelsy is. Now, although I will not pro- 
ceed without your consent and advice, yet I would 
have you to understand that I expect it, and have 
the scheme much at heart at present. The first 
thing that suggested it was their extraordinary re- 
pute in Ettrick and its neighborhood, and being 
everlastingly plagued with writing copies, and 
promising scores which I never meant to perform. 
As my last pamphlet was never known, save to a 
few friends, I wish your advice what pieces in it 
are worth preserving. The Pastoral I am resolved 
to insert, as I am Sandy Tod. As to my manu- 
scripts, they are endless ; and as I doubt you will 
disprove of publishing them wholesale, and letting 
the good help off the bad, I think you must trust 
to my discretion in the selection of a few. I wish 
likewise to know if you think a graven image on the 
first leaf is any recommendation ; and if we might 
print the songs with a letter to you, giving an im- 
partial account of my manner of life and education, 
and, which if you pleased to transcribe, putting He 
for I." 

That Hogg should have supposed Scott would be 



60 JAMES HOGG 

willing to father his own account of his life shows 
the high estimate at which he held himself, and the 
low estimate at which he held Scott, of whose char- 
acter he could have had no conception. It shows 
also that his notions of literary honesty were as 
hazy as his notions of good-breeding, which he vio- 
lated in this letter, where the " Dear Mr. Scott " of 
the beginning becomes at the end " Dear Walter." 

It is not easy to trace the life of Hogg during the 
next five or six years ; for though he was fond of 
writing about himself, he had not the kind of talent 
that is requisite for writing a consecutive narrative, 
nor was the accuracy of his memory to be depended 
on. There are gaps in his autobiographies which 
he either could not or would not bridge over, and 
one of these occurred between his relinquishment 
of the lease of Ettrick House and his removal to 
Nithsdale, where he hired himself as a shepherd to 
a Mr. Harkness, of Mitchel-Slack. One autumn day 
at Nithsdale, while he was herding the ewes of his 
master on this great hill of Queensberry, he was ap- 
proached by two strange men, the elder of whom in- 
quired if his name was not James Hogg, a query 
which he answered cautiously, fearing lest he had 
come after him with an accusation regarding some 
of the lasses. When he had acknowledged his iden- 
tity, his questioner grasped his hand, called him 
" Sir," and said there was not a man in Scotland 



JAMES HOGG 61 

whose hand he was prouder to hold. " My name is 
James Cunningham," he continued, "a name un- 
known to you, though yours is not entirely so to 
me ; and this is my younger brother, AllaD, the 
greatest admirer you have on earth, and himself a 
young, aspiring poet of some promise. You will be 
so kind as to excuse this intrusion of ours on your 
solitude, for, in truth, I could get no peace either 
night or day with Allan till I consented to come 
and see you." Hogg grasped the hand of his 
brother poet, a younger brother by fourteen years, 
and invited him and his brother into a little bothy 
on the hill in which he took his breakfast and din- 
ner on rainy days. It was so small that they had to 
walk in on all fours, and, when they were in, they 
could only hold up their heads in a sitting position. 
They seated themselves on the rushes which served 
as his bed, and spent the whole afternoon with him, 
Master Allan repeating his poetry to Hogg, and 
Hogg, we may be sure, repeating his own poetry in 
turn, the pair partaking of his scrip and his bottle 
of milk, and of something stronger which the elder 
Cunningham had in a bottle, and which, whether it 
was brandy or rum, helped to keep up their spirits 
to a late hour. Such was the first meeting of Hogg 
and Cunningham, who were the best of friends as 
long as they lived, Cunningham outliving Hogg by 
some seven years. 



62 JAMES HOGG 

Nothing shows the kindness of Scott's heart more 
than his interest in the poetic fortunes of Hogg, 
particularly at this time, when his worldly prospects 
were at their lowest ebb. He was generous enough 
to find, or fancy he found, merit in the imitations 
of old ballads which Hogg had written in opposi- 
tion to those included in the Minstrelsy, and it 
was through his encouragement that he went again 
to Edinburgh, where he introduced him to Con- 
stable, who received him pleasantly, but told him 
frankly that his poetry would not sell. Hogg said, 
with equal frankness, that he thought it as good as 
anybody's he had seen. Constable said that might 
be ; but that nobody's poetry would sell, for he 
found it the worst stuff that came to market. How- 
ever, as he appeared to be a gay, queer chiel, if he 
would procure him two hundred subscribers, he 
would publish his book for him, and give him as 
much as he could for it. Hogg did not much like 
the subscription condition, but having no alterna- 
tive he accepted it, and succeeded in getting five 
hundred subscribers before the book was ready. 
He had no plans of delivering the copies subscribed 
for, so he simply sent them to the subscribers ; 
some of whom paid him double, triple, and ten 
times their price, while about one-third of the num- 
ber preferred to take them and pay nothing. Still, 
the venture was not a losing one, for between what 



JAMES HOGG 63 

he obtained on a bill which Constable gave him in 
addition to his subscribers' copies, and what he paid 
him during the same year for a work on the diseases 
of sheep, he realized about three hundred pounds, 
and was richer than he had ever been before. He 
was in his thirty- seventh year when he published 
The Mountain Bard and The Shepherd's Guide. 

The possession of so much money turned the 
head of Hogg, who, in his own words, " went per- 
fectly mad." He took a pasture farm in Dumfries- 
shire, for exactly half more than it was worth, not, 
as he would have us believe, because he was ignor- 
ant of its value, but because he was cheated into it 
by a great rascal who meant to rob him of all he 
had. And not content with this blunder, he must 
needs take another extensive farm which involved 
him still more deeply. "It would have required at 
least one thousand pounds," he wrote, "for every 
one hundred that I possessed to have managed all 
I had taken in hand ; so I got every day out of one 
strait and confusion into a worse. I blundered and 
struggled on for three years between those two 
places, giving up all thoughts of poetry or literature 
of any kind." Fairly run aground at last, he let his 
creditors take all he had, and returned to Ettrick 
Forest, where, he says, he was not only disowned 
by those whom he loved and trusted most, but told 
so to his face. " Having appeared as a poet and a 



64 JAMES HOGG 

speculative farmer besides, no one would now em- 
ploy me as a shepherd. I even appealed to some of 
my old masters, but they refused me, and for a 
whole winter I found myself without employment 
and without money in my native country." 

Something must be done ; and since there was 
nothing for him to do in Ettrick, he wrapped his 
plaid about his shoulders one winter day at the be- 
ginning of his fortieth year, and marched away to 
Edinburgh, determined to push his fortune as a man 
of letters. If he had not been too ignorant to un- 
derstand what literature was, and the difficulties 
that beset all the avenues of approach thereto, he 
would not have dared to attempt such an enterprise ; 
but being ignorant, he dared, for he said that he was 
" in utter desperation." When he got to Edinburgh 
he found that his poetical talents were rated nearly as 
low there as his shepherd qualities were in Ettrick, 
and he sought in vain for employment from the edi- 
tors of magazines and newspapers. They were will- 
ing to print his effusions, but not to pay for them ; 
there was no money going — not a farthing. He ap- 
plied to Constable to print a volume of songs for 
him ; and that douce man of business, though 
averse to the proposition, out of good nature con- 
sented to publish an edition for him, and give him 
half the profits. As he never received any profits, 
however, there probably were none ; for, according 



JAMES HOGG 65 

to Hogg's own showing, The Forest Minstrel was 
a trashy book, only a portion thereof, and that 
the worst, being his own : for he inserted every 
ranting rhyme that he had made in his youth to 
please the circles about the firesides in the country. 
Hogg would have been starved out of Edinburgh 
while he was struggling to obtain a literary foothold 
there, but for the kindness of a Mr. John Grieve, a 
member of the firm of Grieve & Scott, hatters. He 
had known the shepherd from his youth, and had a 
genuine admiration for his poetical gift, an admira- 
tion which was shared by his partner, who was will- 
ing to receive him as a guest in their common house- 
hold. They suffered him to want for nothing, either 
in money or clothes ; for Mr. Grieve always noticed 
his wants and supplied them ; nor would they allow 
him to be obliged to anyone but themselves. Anxi- 
ous to be doing something for himself, and finding no 
chance of employment among the booksellers, Hogg 
cast about for a way of being independent of them, 
and with the confidence which characterized him at 
this period hit upon the way which, above all others, 
promised the least chance of success. This was the 
establishment of a weekly journal, of which he was 
to be the editor, and the chief, if not the sole, con- 
tributor, and which was to instruct the citizens of 
Edinburgh in literature and criticism, manners and 
morals, with whatever else was indispensable to their 
5 



66 JAMES HOGG 

culture and his profit. He mentioned the project to 
several printers, to whom he offered security if they 
would print it for him ; but they refused, unless he 
would procure the name of some bookseller as pub- 
lisher. Then he mentioned it to Constable, who 
laughed at him, and told him he wished him too 
well to encourage him in it. At last he found a 
bookseller, of whom he had never heard, who agreed 
to his terms, and brought out the first number of 
this wonderful weekly on September 1, 1810. It 
was published at four pence, and was called The 
Spy. When Hogg brought out the first and second 
numbers, he thought he had subscribers enough 
to keep the thing going ; but the third or fourth 
number was so indecorous that no less than seventy- 
three of his subscribers forsook him. It was a blow 
to him, but not an instructive one ; for instead of 
mending his ways, he railed against the fastidious- 
ness of his readers, and went on as before. He be- 
gan without literary assistance, and except such as 
came to him unsought from several of his friends, 
who quietly contributed a paper now and then, he 
continued without it for a twelvemonth, when The 
Spy vanished in the limbo of dead newspapers. 

This absurd venture in journalism, by which Hogg- 
was a loser rather than a gainer, was not without 
advantage to him, since it made his name somewhat 
widely known, and contained better examples of his 



JAMES HOGG 67 

poetic gift than any that had yet seen the light. So, 
at least, thought his good friend Grieve, who, con- 
stantly regretting his carelessness, would never be- 
lieve there was any effort in poetry above his reach. 
He persuaded him to take the field again as a poet, 
and, nothing loth, since besides these pieces he had 
some metrical tales by him that he did not wish to 
lose, he removed to a suburban place called Dean- 
haughs, where he planned The Queen's Wake, which 
he wrote in a short time. "It went on of itself," he 
told Gillies, who says that he always ascribed a 
separate vitality and volonte to his compositions, 
so that it was not his business to carry them on ; on 
the contrary, they carried on their author, and car- 
ried him away, till at last he wondered even more 
than others did at his own work ! 

Hogg's new poem, or congeries of poems, finished, 
he asked Constable to publish it, and Constable nat- 
urally declined to commit himself until he had seen 
the manuscript. Hogg demurred to this reasonable 
condition, and loftily asked him what skill he had 
respecting the merits of a book ? He admitted that 
he might have none, but he said he knew how to 
sell a book as well as any man, which was some con- 
cern of Hogg's, and knew how to buy a book, also. At 
last he told Hogg that if he would procure two hun- 
dred subscribers, to secure him from loss, he would 
give him one hundred pounds for the right to print 



btf JAMES HOGG 

a thousand copies. Hogg put his proposals in the 
hands of bis friends, who procured for him the re- 
quisite number of subscribers ; but before they had 
done so he was approached by a young and obscure 
bookseller named Goldie, who requested to see the 
manuscript, and who, after reading it, was anxious 
to publish it, offering the same terms as Constable, 
and, over and above these terms, the price of the 
subscribers' copies to himself. So Constable was 
thrown over, and Goldie became the publisher 
of The Queen's Wake. And a very bad one he 
proved. For though he sold two editions in a 
short time, he failed before he published a third. 
Through the aid of Blackwood, who was one of the 
trustees of his bankrupt estate, Hogg recovered 
about half of this edition, which was sold on com- 
mission for him, and ultimately paid him twice 
as much as he would have received from Goldie. 
But Blackwood did more than this for him, for, hav- 
ing lately formed a business connection with Mur- 
ray, the great London publisher, he handed a por- 
tion of the edition over to him, and so introduced 
Hogg to the world of English readers. 

Hogg may be said to have finished his literary 
apprenticeship with The Queen's Wake, which 
was published in his forty-third year, and was the 
prologue to a succession of other books in verse and 
prose. That one so ignorant as he should have 



JAMES HOGG 69 

written it excited the wonder of all who knew him, 
and gave it a distinction which readers of to-day fail 
to find in it. It was remarkable as the work of an 
unlettered man, but not so remarkable, all things 
coDsiclered, as a work of the period when it appeared. 
It was an outgrowth o*f the love of old balladry, 
which Scott awakened and stimulated in his Min- 
strelsy (1802-3), and a still stronger outgrowth of 
the element of metrical romance which he turned 
to such account in The Lay of the Last Minstrel 
(1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the 
Lake (1810). Scott was inspired by the chivalrous 
spirit of the Past, Hogg was inspired by Scott. 
That the master was the superior to the scholar was 
a matter of course, not merely because he was a 
better poet, with a clearer vision and broader sym- 
pathies, but because he was thoroughly equipped as 
a man of letters. Both wrote rapidly, for it was a 
period of voluminous writing that eschewed correc- 
tion and revision ; but however carelessly Scott may 
have written, he alwaj's wrote in good taste, which 
was an unknown quality with Hogg. Still the shep- 
herd was a poet, and was acknowledged as such by 
the foremost of his contemporaries — Scott, Byron, 
Southey, Wordsworth — even when they came to know 
him personally, and were subjected to his queer 
ways. Hogg understood the value of his reputa- 
tion, and was not slow to take advantage of it, for 



70 JAMES HOGG 

when his brother poets, as he called them, did not 
seek his acquaintance, he was not in the least back- 
ward in seeking theirs. He sought "Wilson, who 
had lately published The Isle of Palms, which he 
admired, and iuvited him to dinner at his lodgings 
in the Gabriel Eoad, and found him a man after his 
own heart. He was sought by Gillies, whom he also 
found a man after his own heart, and was very com- 
municative with him, rattling away about himself 
and his writings. " But aiblins ye think owre 
muckle o' the Queen's Wake. It's tolerably gude, 
I'll no deny that ; but, eh, man, that's naething com- 
pared wi' what I am able to do ! I hae a grand 
poyem upon the sclate yenno, that fashes me rather, 
for it wants to rin on faster than I can copy with 
the pen. Ye'll think but little of the Queen's 
Wake when ye come to see that ! " Gillies natur- 
ally expressed a wish to hear a portion of the grand 
" poyem upon the sclate ; " but Hogg at once de- 
murred. "Na, na, fules and bairns should never 
see work half done." Gillies insisted that Voltaire 
had his old woman (he meant Moliere), and that 
Scott was in the habit of consulting with William 
Erskine and other friends on his poems as they ad- 
vanced ; but Hogg scouted the idea. " That's vera 
like a man's that frighted to gang by himsel' and 
needs somebody to lead him. Eh, man, neither 
William Erskine, nor any critic beneath the sun, 



JAMES HOGG 71 

shall ever lead mei ! If I nae ha sense enouch to 
mak and mend my ain work, no other hands or 
heads shall meddle wi' it ; I want na help, thank 
God, neither from books nor men." 

Wilson invited Hogg to visit him at his house in 
Cumberland, and nothing loth, for he was fond of 
new scenes and new faces, he went and spent a 
month, and they had some curious doings among 
the gentlemen and poets thereabout. Among the 
Lake poets whose acquaintance he made was Sou- 
they, to whom, at Greta Hall, he sent a note one 
evening, inviting him to come to the Queen's Head 
and see him. He came, and stayed an hour or two 
with him, greatly to his grief and disappointment, 
since he refused to participate in his ram punch ! 
For a poet to refuse his glass was a phenomenon to 
the shepherd, who doubted if perfect sobriety and 
transcendent poetical genius could exist together ; 
he was sure they could not in Scotland, whatever 
they might do in England, where there was little 
that was worth drinking ! He breakfasted with 
Southey the next morning, and spent that day and 
the next with him, travelling over the hills and sail- 
ing on the lake, Southey, who was in high spirits, 
repeating songs and ballads, and chaffing his neph- 
ew, young Coleridge, whom he was fond of. 

Hogg made the acquaintance of another Lake 
poet about this time, meeting him first at a dinner 



72 JAMES HOGG 

in Edinburgh, travelling with him and his wife to 
the scenes of the Yarrow, and rejoining him later at 
his house in Rydal Mount. There was, there could 
be, nothing in common between Hogg and "Words- 
worth, the vanity of both was so dominant, and that 
there should be a scene between them was on the 
cards. It occurred at Rydal one night after dinner, 
at which Wilson, De Quincey, and others were pres- 
ent, and it was brought about by an aurora, or 
something of the kind, which threw a great arch 
across the heavens. They went out to see it, and, 
arm in arm, by twos and threes, walked up and 
down and discussed it, the women-folk wondering 
what it meant, and hoping no harm would come of 
it. Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, expressed her 
fears to Hogg, upon whose arm she was leaning, 
and he, thinking to say a good thing, blundered 
out : " Hout, me'm, it's neither mair nor less than 
joost a treeumphal airch in honor of the meeting of 
the poets." Whereupon Wordsworth, who had the 
arm of De Quince}', demanded, "Poets? Poets? 
What does the fellow*mean? Where are they?" 
" Who could forgive this ? " asks Hogg, in his auto- 
biography. And answers : " For my part, I never 
can, and never will ! " 

Hogg had some relation with another poet of this 
period, and fortunately perhaps for both, it was 
epistolatory and not personal. What it was we learn 



JAMES HOGG 73 

from a letter written by Byron to bis publisher, under 
the date of August 4, 1814 : "I have a most amus- 
ing epistle from the Ettrick bard — Hogg ; in which, 
speaking of his bookseller whom he denominates the 
' shabbiest ' of the trade for not ' lifting his bills,' he 
adds in so many words, ' curse him and them both.' 
This is a pretty prelude to asking you to adopt him 
(the said Hogg) ; but this he wishes ; and if you 
please, you and I will talk it over. He has a poem 
ready for the press (and your bills, too, if l liftable '), 
and bestows some benediction on Mr. Moore for his 
abduction of Lara from this forthcoming Miscel- 
lany." 

The Miscellany to which Byron referred, was a 
scheme of Hogg's for putting money in his pocket, 
whence, when at intervals it found its way there, 
it speedily disappeared. One might think the pov- 
erty of his early years would have made him sav- 
ing, but it only made him extravagant. His head 
was turned by the sum that Constable paid him for 
The Shepherd's Guide and The Mountain Bard, and 
he straightway squandered it in farming. He re- 
ceived a present of a hundred guineas from the 
Countess of Dalkeith, to whom he dedicated The 
Forest Minstrel, and of course that followed it. 
Money burned his fingers. Moreover he was fond 
of company, which was not always of the best ; for 
though Gillies and Wilson introduced him to good 



74 JAMES HOGG 

social circles in town and country, others often in- 
troduced him into roystering convivial sets where he 
had no need to learn to drink deep. He was not so 
much careless in his habits as desultory and fitful, 
alternating seasons of idleness with tremendous 
heats of industry. He wrote The Queen's Wake in 
a few weeks, and dashed off his next two poems, 
The Pilgrims of the Sun (1815) and Mador of the 
Moor (1816) at the same break-neck speed. Be- 
tween these — perhaps before them — he projected a 
Miscellany, to which his brother poets were to con- 
tribute, and which he was to publish for his own 
benefit. But they did not contribute, though he 
said that Byron and Southey promised to do so. 
Scott refused to have anything to do with it, and 
was at once torn out of his good books. How 
angry and unmannerly he was may be imagined 
from one of his letters to Scott, in which the mild- 
est expression was " Believe me, sir, yours with 
disgust." Not long afterward the petulant poet 
was taken dangerously ill at his lodgings, and Scott 
hearing of his illness called on his friend Grieve, 
and, charging him not to mention the circumstance, 
offered to take on himself the expenses of the best 
medical attendance. This fact came to the knowl- 
edge of Hogg, who proceeded to eat humble pie — 
not asking Scott for a renewal of their former in- 
timacy, for haply his family would not suffer it 



JAMES HOGG 75 

after what he had written — but that when they met 
they might shake hands, and speak to one another 
as old acquaintances. Scott's reply was a short 
note, in which he told him to think no more of the 
business, but to come and breakfast with him the 
next morning. Hogg's Miscellany contributors fail- 
ing him, he set to work, and in three weeks wrote 
the Miscellany himself, and, to show what he could 
do when he had a mind to, he imitated the most 
notable of the delinquent band, and called the com- 
posite composition The Poetic Mirror or the Liv- 
ing Bards of Britain. We have his word for it that 
it was considered clever, and it may have been ; but 
it can hardly have been as clever, I should say, for 
I have not seen it, as the Rejected Addresses, which 
was published three or four years before, and may 
have given him the idea. 

What Hogg was up to this time he remained to 
the end of his days. A man with a poetic gift — one 
may almost say with a certain literary gift — but with 
no skill in literature. He was ignorant and confident 
— ignorant of the world and its ways, and confident 
of himself and what he could do. If Scott could write 
metrical romances, he could ; if the author of Wav- 
erley could write stories, he could ; whatever any- 
body could do, he could do. He wrote many tales 
— The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1817), The Three 
Perils of Man (1821), The Three Perils of Worn- 



76 JAMES HOGG 

an (1823), The Confessions of a Fanatic (1824), and 
others which are forgotten. He edited two vol- 
umes of Jacobite Songs ; he wrote another met- 
rical romance, Queen Hynde, and much besides in 
Blackwood's Magazine and elsewhere. The world 
was good to him, better than to most poets ; for it 
made allowance for his untrained temperament, and 
his unrestrained egotism. Men liked him — Scott, 
Wilson, Southey — and not least among them the 
Duke of Buccleuch, who gave him rent free the 
lease of a farm on Altrive Lake, where he kept open 
house year in and year out, feasting his flatterers, 
whom he should have turned out of doors. And 
women liked him. At least one did, well enough to 
marry him at the age of fifty. 

Such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who 
died on November 21, 1835, in his sixty-fifth year. 



WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 

There are certain books in my small library which 
are so endeared to me by association that I am apt 
to overrate their intellectual value, remembering, as 
I do, the times and places where I read them for the 
first time, or, going back farther among my scanty 
pleasures of memory, the hour when I stumbled 
across them on an old bookstall. I have sometimes 
thought that I might have been a scholar in some 
direction, instead of a desultory reader in many di- 
rections, if the pocket money which was doled out 
to me in boyhood had enabled me to buy the books 
I wanted ; but as it came in very small sums, and as 
infrequently as angel visits, I bought what I could, 
not what I would — odd volumes of Shakespeare, or 
such versifiers as Falconer and Beattie, whom I was 
never young enough to consider poets, though I 
thought the world did, and read them accordingly. 
I had from the beginning an instinct in matters po- 
etical — the instinct which told me that one kind of 
writing in verse was poetry, while another kind of 
writing in verse was not poetry ; though precisely 



78 WILLIAM MOTHEKWELL 

what poetry was I could not for my life have told. 
I knew that Burns was a poet, though I was slow in 
mastering his Doric dialect, that Collins was a poet, 
and that Falconer and Beattie were not poets. It 
was my good fortune to begin right. There was, of 
course, a world of things I had to learn, but I nev- 
er had to unlearn anything ; for the books which 
pleased me as a boy have always pleased me as a 
man, and the books which did not please me as a 
boy I have never been able to take kindly to. My 
likes and dislikes were positive, and not the less so 
because they were occasionally aroused by the same 
author, who was neither wholly bad nor wholly good. 
Such a one was William Motherwell, who was well 
thought of in my younger years ; but who, I fancy, 
is not much read now. 

The family name of Motherwell was derived from 
a village of that name in the parish of Dalziel, the 
county of Lanark, Scotland, which village in turn 
derived its name from a spring which once existed 
there (and, for aught I know, may still be existing 
there), which in the olden time was reported to pos- 
sess certain medicinal virtues, and called the Well 
of Our Ladye, in the belief that it was under the 
protecting care of the Virgin Mother ; whence the 
name, Motherwell, which, as a surname, has been 
traced back to the close of the thirteenth century. 
A slip of the Motherwell tree was transplanted, at 



WILLIAM MOTHEKWELL 79 

the beginning of the fifteenth century, into Stirling- 
shire, where it flourished on the banks of the Car- 
ron, at a place called Muirmill, from the calling of 
the proprietors, who, generation after generation, 
were hereditary millers. But not all of them ; for 
in the last decade of the eighteenth century a Will- 
iam Motherwell, of that ilk, settled at Glasgow, 
where he followed the business of an ironmonger, 
and where, on October 13, 1797, about fifteen 
months after the death of Burns, his third son, our 
William Motherwell, was born. The elder Mother- 
well was not prosperous at Glasgow ; so early in the 
present century he removed with his family to Edin- 
burgh, where, in his eighth year, Master William 
was placed under the charge of a Mr. William Len- 
nie, the author of several school-books, who was 
thought to be an eminent teacher of English. Be- 
ginning with the alphabet, and passing thence into 
the earlier branches of boyish education, Mother- 
well ultimately became the best scholar that Mr. 
Lennie had, teaching himself in a twelvemonth a 
small, distinct, and beautiful handwriting, and draw- 
ing maps so cleverly that they might be mistaken 
for copper-plate engravings. When William was in 
the last year of his course, which ended in the fall 
of 1808, his eleventh year, there was in the Mr. Len- 
nie's school a girl named Jane Morrison. She was 
the daughter of a brewer and cornfactor in Alloa, 



80 WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 

was about Motherwell's age, and was pretty. But I 
will let Mr. Lennie describe her : "Her hair was of 
a lightish brown, approaching to fair : her eyes were 
dark, and had a sweet and gentle expression ; her 
temper was mild, and her manners unassuming. 
Her dress was also neat and tidy. In winter she 
wore a pale-blue pelisse, then the fashionable color, 
and a light-colored beaver with a feather." 

Motherwell greatly admired this charming young 
person in the light-blue pelisse ; but as she is said 
to have been wholly unconscious of his admiration, 
he could hardly have known her out of school, and 
must have been very backward there in showing 
what he felt. They left school at the same time, 
and never met again, she returning to her parents at 
Alloa, and he going to Paisley, where he was con- 
signed to the care of an uncle, a w r ell-to-do iron- 
founder, by whom he was sent to the Paisley Gram- 
mar School, where he remained for three years, and 
is supposed to have wasted in what are called works 
of imagination the time that should have been de- 
voted to school exercises, and to have entertained 
his school - fellows with stories about castles, and 
robbers, and strange out of the way adventures, 
spawned, no doubt, from his recollections of Mrs. 
Kadcliffe and Monk Lewis. At the age of fifteen he 
was removed from school by his uncle, and trans- 
ferred to the office of the Sheriff-Clerk of Paisley, 



WILLIAM MOTHEKWELL 81 

which was no more to his taste, I fancy, than a law 
office was to my taste at his age. But boys were 
not allowed to choose their employments then, nor 
in my earlier days, particularly boys whose fathers 
were unprosperous, or who were fatherless. He 
turned his talents in penmanship to account in de- 
ciphering ancient legal documents, and in sketch- 
ing figures in armor and otherwise. He was given 
on one occasion an old document to copy, and in- 
stead of making an ordinary transcript, as he was 
expected to, he surprised his employer by return- 
ing a facsimile so perfect, that except for the color 
and texture of the paper, it would have been difficult 
to distinguish it from the original manuscript. It 
was a dangerous accomplishment for a boy ; but 
Motherwell was neither an Ireland nor a Chatter- 
ton, so no harm came of it, or only such harm to 
himself as resulted in later years from his attempts 
to reproduce the spirit of early English poetry. 

Motherwell performed his clerical duties in the 
office of the Sheriff-Clerk until he was well on his 
twenty-fourth year, when he was appointed Sheriff- 
Clerk Depute of Eenfrewshire, an office which he 
held until he had completed his thirty-second year. 
Its emoluments brought him a considerable income, 
much of which he spent in buying books that hit 
his taste, accumulating a large library, which was 
rich in old poetry and historical romance. At what 
6 



82 WILLIAM MOTHEEWELL 

time he first began to write his biographers have 
not been able to discover, his early manhood was 
passed in such laborious obscurity. He is said to 
have written when only fourteen the first draft of 
the poem in which he celebrated his childish enam- 
ourment of Miss Morrison ; but it is not very likely. 
His first book, The Harp of Renfrewshire, which 
was published anonymously in his twenty - second 
year, was a collection of selections from the poets of 
that county, beginning with Sir Hugh Montgome- 
rie, who died a very old man, nineteen years before 
the birth of Shakespeare, and ending with Robert 
Tannahill, who went out of what little mind he had 
in the spring of 1810, at the age of thirty - five. 
Motherwell wrote the introductory essay for this 
collection (which I have never seen) and contributed 
notes, which are said to be many and valuable. It 
was the kind of book that might have been expected 
from a young man with antiquarian tastes, and it 
indicated the drift of his reading, and the course it 
would probably take thereafter among the song- 
writers and balladists of Scotland. It was a favorite 
field of research among Motherwell's countrymen, 
for success therein, if it was a guarantee of pecunia- 
ry gain, was also the certainty of literary reputation. 
In the spring of 1825 Motherwell sent to Sir 
Walter Scott a curious old version of the ballad 
of Gil Morris, upon which Home founded his 



WILLIAM MOTHEEWELL 83 

tragedy of Douglas, which some of his admiring 
countrymen thought superior to anything of Shake- 
speare's (" Where's your Wully Shakespeare noo ? "), 
and which interested Motherwell because the ad- 
venture which it related occurred at Carrondale, 
the home of his ancestors. The shadow of the 
calamity that was about to fall upon the great min- 
strel was lowering darkly before him ; but, true to 
his love of letters and the impulse of his kind heart, 
he acknowledged its receipt at once, and, entering 
into the spirit of Motherwell's pursuit, wrote him a 
long, scholarly, thoughtful, generous letter of en- 
couragement and advice, which, like every letter he 
ever wrote, was an honor to the one who received 
it as well as to the one who sent it. Minstrelsy, 
Ancient and Modern, was published at Glasgow in 
1827, in two volumes, and the reputation of Mother- 
well as a student and editor of balladry was estab- 
lished. The year before these volumes were issued 
there was started at Paisley the Paisley Advertiser, 
the second editor of which was an Irish gentleman, 
named William Kennedy, to whom our man of bal- 
lads was drawn by the ties that sometimes bind lov- 
ers of letters and artificers of verse ; and they be- 
came fast friends. Motherwell contributed to, and 
became a proprietor in, the Advertiser, and on the 
retirement of Mr. Kennedy, in 1828, succeeded him 
as its editor. He also began at this time, and 



84 WILLIAM MOTHEEWELL 

carried on for a year, the Paisley Magazine, which 
was considered creditable as a provincial periodical, 
and which, no doubt, surpassed any metropolitan 
one in its poetical department, since it contained 
three notable poems from his pen. He edited the 
Advertiser for about two years, and it is to be pre- 
sumed successfully ; for at the end of that time he 
was invited to become editor of the Glasgow Courier, 
and he accepted the invitation. He had got on in 
the world since he made facsimiles of old documents 
in the office of the Sheriff-Clerk, and, if it had been 
slowly, it had been surely. He was known as an 
editor and a journalist, and was beginning to be 
known as a poet. His friend Kennedy dedicated to 
him a volume of verse in the year that he removed 
to Glasgow (The Arrow and the Eose, and Other 
Poems, 1830), and two years later he returned the 
compliment by dedicating to Kennedy the first 
selection of his own verse, Poems, Narrative and 
Lyrical. 

The career of Motherwell as the editor of the 
Glasgow Courier was not, I think, one that his 
friends and admirers would have selected for him, if 
the choice had depended upon them, nor, I think, 
one that he would have selected for himself if the 
choice had depended upon him. But the res angusta 
domi are imperative and implacable. Speaking for 
myself, and solely from my own point of view, to be 



WILLIAM MOTHEEWELL 85 

the editor of a political paper is to occupy a position 
which no man of letters, least of all a poet, ought to 
occupy, since there is never any lack of the kind of 
men who are fitted to occupy such positions, fitted 
by the things they call their minds, by their con- 
fideDce in what they flatter themselves are their 
opinions, by their adherence to the tenets of the 
party to which they fancy they belong, and by 
sundry other qualities which are not becoming in 
poets, and men of letters, and gentlemen. That the 
editors of political journals may believe that the 
rubbish they write is the truth, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth, I will not deny, so various 
are the vagaries of mankind ; but admitting this be- 
lief of theirs, I must say that I am sorry for them, 
and sorry in proportion to their talents. The Glas- 
gow Courier was a Tory paper, published at a period 
which was a shock to every fibre in the nature of 
Motherwell. It was a troublous, a dangerous time 
in the politics of England, of France, of the world, 
one may say ; for the old order was going, and the 
new order was coming. The Eeform Bill, the glo- 
rious days of July, and all the rest of that turmoil 
is ancient history, and need not be repeated now. 
That Motherwell took any, the least, part in it is 
to be regretted ; for he must have written words 
which had better not have been written, and inflicted 
and suffered pangs which might have been spared, 



86 WILLIAM MOTHEKWELL 

or might at any rate have been inflicted and suffered 
by men inferior to him. 

He fell upon evil days and evil tongues when he 
joined the Orange Society, of which he was made 
one of the district secretaries for the West of Scot- 
land — a folly which would seem to show that his 
brain was disordered, and which led to his being 
summoned to London, to appear before a Committee 
of the House of Commons whose business and duty 
was to inquire into the constitution and practices 
of the Orange Society. He appeared before this 
committee, and lost his head — not because he lacked 
courage to state what he knew, supposing that he 
really knew anything — but because he was unready 
in action and speech. " He not only required time 
to arrange his ideas and to consolidate his thoughts 
on the most ordinary occasions, but he was habitually 
slow, and even confused, in the expression of them. 
No ordeal could, therefore, be more embarrassing to 
him than a formal examination before a body of 
sharp-witted men, whose pleasure it not infrequent- 
ly is to lay snares for an inexperienced witness." 
Motherwell's biographer tells us that he was haunted 
by strange fancies while in London ; that the com- 
mittee perceived that something was wrong with 
him, and that one of them, a Scottish member, of 
whom he had often spoken severely in his editorial 
capacity, treated him with marked attention, and 



WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 87 

had him sent safely back to Glasgow, where, it is to 
be hoped, he softened his editorial severity. But 
the end was at hand ; for on the last day of October, 
1835, eighteen days after his thirty-eighth birthday, 
he dined and spent the evening at the' house of a 
friend in the suburbs of Glasgow. " There was 
dancing, and it was observed that he bled freely at 
the nose, which was attributed to the heated state of 
the apartments. On going into the open air for a 
short time, the bleeding stopped, and at half-past ten 
he left his friend's house in the company of the late 
Mr. Robert McNish (better known as the Modern 
Pythagorean) and the late Mr. Philip Ramsay, and 
from these gentlemen he parted about eleven o'clock. 
At four o'clock in the morning of the 1st of Novem- 
ber, he was suddenly struck while in bed with a 
violent stroke of apoplexy, which almost instantly 
deprived him of consciousness. He had simply 
time to exclaim : ' My head ! My head ! ' when he 
fell back on the pillow, and never spoke more." 

Such was William Motherwell, whose poetry I 
read over and over in my nonage, in summer when 
the days were long, and my work ended before the 
setting of the sun, and under my evening lamp^ 
when it was too dark and cold to be out-of-doors. 
It attracted me, and it repelled me. I knew then 
why it attracted me, and I know now, what I did 
not then, why it repelled me. It was because a 



88 WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 

great deal of it was a forced, not a natural, growth — 
a simulation of moods and feelings which did not 
exist in the mind or heart of the poet, a make-believe 
of love and loss, of sin and sorrow. It was not a 
creation, but a production, a manufactured melan- 
choly, an elaborated gloom. It is studiedly morbid 
and predeterminedly unhealthy, darkened with imag- 
inary infamy, convulsive with pretended pangs. It 
was, in short, merely literary verse, and was, there- 
fore, a sham and a fraud. But this is only one side 
of it ; for there is another side, and that, within the 
limitations of Motherwell's genius, is glorious and 
noble. Many poets have sung of childish love, but 
none so well as Motherwell in Jeanie Morrison, 
which is full of feeling and pathetic tenderness. 
Many poets have sung of betrayed womanliness (for 
lovely woman will stoop to folly), but none so well 
as Motherwell in My heid is like to rend, "Willie, 
the sorrow of which is heartfelt and profound. Very 
different from these Scotch ballads are the Norse 
songs, The Battle-flag of Sigurd, The Wooing Song 
of Jarl Egill Skallagrim, and The Sword Chant of 
Thorstein Baudi, which are conceived in the spirit 
of the old skalds, wild and rugged, dark and pas- 
sionate, threatening like the winds, terrible like 
the waves, and every way powerful and admirable. 
There is a dramatic element in these, and in Oug- 
lou's Onslaught, The Covenanter's Battle Chant, 



WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 89 

The Trooper's Ditty, and The Cavalier's Song, 
which ought to be well known, since they figure 
in the anthologies. But the anthologies do not al- 
ways give us a poet's best things ; for here is 
one of Motherwell's songs which has never to my 
knowledge appeared in any collection, and which I 
am sure every lover of good poetry will be glad to 
have: 

O Wae be to the Orders. 

O, wae be to the orders that marched my luve awa', 
And wae be to the cruel cause that gars my tears doun fa' ; 
O, wae be to the bluidy wars in Hie Germanie, 
For they have ta'en my luve, and left a broken heart 
to me. 

The drums beat in the mornin', afore the scriech o' day, 
And the wee, wee fifes piped loud and shrill, while yet 

the morn was gray ; 
The bonnie flags were a' unfurled, a gallant sight to see, 
But wae's me for my sodger lad that marched to Germanie. 

O, lang, lang is the travel to the bonnie Pier o' Leith, 

O, dreich it is to gang on foot wi' the snaw-drift in the 

teeth ! 
And O, the cauld wind froze the tear that gathered in my 

e'e, 
When I gaed there to see my luve embark for Germanie. 

I looked ower the braid, blue sea, sae lang as could be seen 
Ae wee bit sail upon the ship that my sodger lad was in ; 



90 WILLIAM MOTHEKWELL 

But the wind was blawin' sair and snell, and the ship 

sailed speedilie, 
And the waves and cruel wars have twinned my winsome 

luve frae me. 

I never think o' dancin', and I downa try to sing, 

But a' the day I speir what news kind neihour bodies 

bring ; 
I sometimes knit a stockin', if knittin' it may be, 
Syne for every loop that I cast on, I am sure to let down 

three. 

My father gays I'm in a pet, my mither jeers at me, 
And bans me for a daudit wean, in dorts for aye to be ; 
But little weet they o' the cause that drumles sae my e'e, 
O, they hae nae winsome luve like mine in the wars o 7 
Germanie ! 



THE EARLY YEARS OF GIFFORD 

If there was one critic who more than all other 
professors of the ungentle craft was detested by the 
writers of his time, it was William Gifford, and their 
detestation, while often violent in its expression, 
was richly deserved. It was not merely because he 
was a critic that he was hated, but because he was 
malicious and malignant, and because he did not 
criticise from a literary, but from a political, point 
of view. That he was not alone in this last pecu- 
liarity, this deliberate and obstinate incompetency, 
as we may say, was admitted by his victims, who, 
belabored by the bludgeons of Lockhart, Maginn, 
and Wilson, were able before long to forgive, if they 
could not quite forget, those jocose blackguards, 
who could take as well as give hard blows ; but 
Gifford they never forgave. They despised him for 
his venal pen, his sycophancy to the great, and for 
his low origin. That he should have been despised 
on account of his origin was hard ; for he neither 
concealed it, as most men would have done, nor 
boasted of it, as many might have done, but ac- 



92 THE EARLY YEARS OF GIFFORD 

knowledged it in the frankest and manliest way. 
The story of his early years, as related by himself, 
was a melancholy, a pathetic ODe, and to have lived 
through them and risen above them, as he did, was 
to deserve well of the world. 

He tells us, in his autobiography, that he knew 
little of his family, and of that little not much that 
was precise. His great-grandfather, the oldest of 
his ancestors of whom he had heard, possessed con- 
siderable property near Ashburton, Devonshire. 
The family to which he belonged was reputed to 
rank among the most ancient and respectable in 
that county, and was counted at one time among 
the wealthiest ; but its prosperity and its dignity 
were not destined to a long life, their decadence 
beginning with the son of this gentleman, who was 
so extravagant and dissipated that a large part of 
the property was bequeathed from him. The breed 
of the Giffords was not improved by his son Edward, 
who ran away from school and shipped on board of 
a man-of-war, and, on being reclaimed from that ser- 
vitude and sent to school again, ran away a second 
time, and wandered about the country with the band 
of Bamfylde Moor Carew, the king of the gypsies. 
Cut off by his father, for no elderly prodigal ever 
believed in the penitence of his descendant, he arti- 
cled himself to a plumber and glazier, with whom 
he remained long enough to learn his trade. Left 



THE EAELY YEAES OF GIFFOKD 93 

the owner of two small estates by the death of his 
father, he married Elizabeth Cain, the daughter of 
a carpenter of Ashburton, and removed to South 
Molton, where he set up in business for himself. 
The wild blood in this young man, who could be 
kept to nothing long, broke out at the end of four 
or five years, when he made, or joined in, an attempt 
to create a riot in a Methodist chapel ; to escape 
prosecution for which act he fled, and shipped on a 
large armed transport in the service of the Govern- 
ment, of which, being a good seaman, he rose to be 
second in command. His wife returned to Ash- 
burton, where, in April, 1756, William Gifford was 
born. The business at South Molton could not 
have been a profitable one, for her only resource 
on quitting it was the rent of three or four small 
fields which still remained unsold. With this she 
did what she could for herself and her child, who, 
as soon as he was old enough to be trusted out of 
her sight, was sent to a school-mistress, from whom 
he learned the rudiments of spelling. His best 
teacher, however, was his mother, who had stored 
her mind with the current literature of her class in 
the middle of the last century, which mostly con- 
sisted of chap-book lore, and from her he acquired 
much curious knowledge concerning Catskin, the 
Golden Bull, the Bloody Gardener, and other famous 
but forgotten rustic heroes. 



94 THE EAELT TEAES OF GIEFOED 

Mariner Gifford returned at the end of eight 
years to his wife and child. He had had good 
wages since his departure, and had received more 
than one hundred pounds for prize-money ; but, 
sailor-like, he did not fetch much of it home with 
him. The little property now left was turned into 
money, and a trifle more was added to it by an 
agreement to renounce all future pretensions to an 
estate at Totness, which had been suffered to fall 
into decay, and of which the rents had been so long 
unclaimed that they could not be recovered except 
by an expensive litigation. With this capital in 
hand Mr. Gilford started in business again, this time 
as a glazier and house-painter. Master William 
was put in the free school, where he stayed about 
three years, and where he learned to read better, 
and to cipher a little. His home life could not have 
been a happy one, if he had had wit enough to per- 
ceive it, for his father, upon whom experience was 
lost, wasted his time in unprofitable pursuits to the 
great detriment of his business, and drank deeply, 
as was the fashion then. He died of a decayed and 
broken constitution before he was forty. That the 
boy did not greatly love him was not to be wondered 
at, since he had not grown up with him, and his 
little advances to familiarity were repulsed with 
coldness or anger. He did not long feel his loss, 
nor was it a subject of much sorrow to him that his 



THE EARLY YEARS OF GIFFORD 95 

mother was not able to keep him at school, though 
he had now acquired a love of reading. She de- 
termined to continue the business of her dead hus- 
band, for which determination she had an added 
reason in the shape of a second boy, and she did so, 
after engaging a couple of journeymen, who, dis- 
covering that she was ignorant of the business, 
squandered her property and embezzled her money. 
She followed her husband in less than a twelve- 
month. She had borne his infirmities with patience 
and good humor ; she loved her children dearly, 
and died at last, exhausted with anxiety and grief 
on their account. The poor orphans were left badly 
off, for the older was not quite thirteen, and the 
younger was hardly two, and they had not a relative 
or friend in the world. Everything was seized upon 
by a person named Carlile, for money advanced to 
their mother. There was no one to dispute the jus- 
tice of his claims, and no one to interfere, so he did 
what he liked, which was to send the younger child 
to the almshouse, and take to his own house the 
elder, whose godfather he had been. Kespect for 
the opinion of the town, which was that he had 
amply repaid himself by the sale of the widow's 
effects, induced him to send William to school again, 
where he was more successful in learning. He was 
fond of arithmetic, and the master began to distin- 
guish him, but before three months his golden days 



9b THE EAKLY YEAKS OF GIFFOKD 

were over. Carlile sickened at the expense of his 
schooling, and the town having by this time become 
indifferent to the boy's fate, he looked around for 
an opportunity of ridding himself of a useless 
charge. Before reaching this miserly conclusion 
he had tried to make him a farmer's boy, but had 
failed, for after driving the plough one day the lad 
had refused to do so any longer. During the life- 
time of his father he had fallen from a table he was 
attempting to climb, and, drawing it after him, its 
edge had struck his breast, and injured him so se- 
verely that he had never recovered his health. See- 
ing that he would not, and could not, plough, Car- 
lile made up his mind to send him to Newfoundland 
to assist in a store, and took him to Dartmouth to 
a person who was to fit him out. but who, on seeing 
him declared that he was "too small." The next 
move of his graceless godfather was to place him on 
a coaster at Brixham. What use was made of him 
he does not state, but useful we may be sure he 
was, for he remained on the coaster for nearly a 
year, learning nautical terms, and contracting a love 
for the sea, but reading nothing, for books there 
were none on the Two Brothers, except the Coasting- 
Pilot. His master, though ignorant and rough, was 
not ill-natured ; his mistress, who pitied him for his 
weakness and tender years, was always kind ; and 
though he appeared to be overlooked by the sweet 



THE EAKLY YEAES OF GIFFOED 97 

little cherub that sits up aloft to keep watch for the 
soul of poor Jack, he was certainly observed by the 
good women of Brixham, who, having known his 
parents, and seeing him running about the beach 
in a ragged jacket and trousers, reported that fact 
in Ashburton, whither they went twice a week with 
fish. The tale they told there revived the memory 
of the lad among his townspeople, who, in their 
indignation, made so free with the name of his god- 
father that he was shamed, or frightened, into send- 
ing for him. He returned, and was put to school 
again, and soon at the head of it, qualified to assist 
the master in case of an emergency. The kindness 
of the master, who usually gave him a trifle on these 
occasions, led him to think that if he engaged with 
him as a regular assistant, and undertook the in- 
struction of a few evening scholars, he might, with 
a little additional aid, be enabled to support him- 
self. He had a further object in view, and that was 
to succeed his first master, who, grown old and in- 
firm, was not likely to hold out more than three or 
four years. It was a pretty educational castle in 
the air, and it might have been builded in time, but 
unfortunately he mentioned it to Carlile, who not 
only treated it with the utmost contempt, but 
straightway removed him from school, and appren- 
ticed him to a shoemaker. Sullenly and silently 
he went to his new master, a noisy, disputatious 
7 



98 THE EAELY YEAES OF GIFEOED 

Presbyterian, who bullied his opponents by the use 
of synonymes of which they were ignorant. He 
learned nothing from this Boanerges, and so lit- 
tle of the trade to which he was bound, and which 
he hated, that he sank by degrees to the common 
drudge of the family. He still cherished the hope 
of succeeding his old master, and secretly pursued 
his favorite study of arithmetic at every interval of 
leisure. But these intervals, which were not fre- 
quent, soon became less so, his master having des- 
tined his youngest son for the situation to which he 
aspired. He had but one book — a treatise on Alge- 
bra, given him by a young woman who had found it 
in a lodging-house. He considered it a treasure, 
but it was a treasure locked up, for it supposed the 
reader to be well acquainted with simple equations, 
of which he knew nothing. His master's son, how- 
ever, had purchased Fenning's Introduction, which 
was precisely what was wanted ; but he had care- 
fully concealed it, and it was only by chance that 
our would-be mathematician stumbled upon its hid- 
ing-place. He sat up the greatest part of several 
nights successively, and before he was discovered 
had completely mastered it. He could now enter 
upon his own Algebra, which carried him pretty far 
into the science. But a difficulty still remained. 
He had not a farthing on earth, nor a friend to give 
him one ; pen, ink, and paper were therefore as 



THE EAELY YEAES OF GIFFORD 99 

completely out of his reach as a crown and sceptre. 
There was one resource, indeed, but the greatest 
caution was necessary in using it. He beat out 
pieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought 
his problems upon them with a blunted awl ; for 
the rest, his memory was tenacious, and he could 
multiply and divide by it to a great extent. 

His first intellectual effort was in poetry, of which 
he had not dreamed before, and of which he 
scarcely knew the name, and it happened in this 
wise : A person had undertaken to paint a sign for 
an ale-house in Ashburton, but was so little at home 
in the animal kingdom that, instead of a lion, he 
produced a dog ! This awkward affair moved one 
of the acquaintances of our mathematical shoe- 
maker to write a set of verses. He liked them, 
but fancied he could compose something more to 
the purpose himself. He made the experiment, 
and was allowed by his shopmates to have suc- 
ceeded. He thought no more of the matter until 
another trifling occurrence furnished him with a 
fresh subject ; so he went on until he had got to- 
gether about a dozen pieces, which, poor as they 
were, were talked about in his limited circle, and he 
was invited to repeat them out of it. His perform- 
ances were applauded and rewarded, for now and 
then little collections were made for him, and he 
received as much as sixpence in an evening. He 



100 THE EARLY YEAES OF GIEFORD 

furnished himself by degrees with peri, ink, and 
paper, and books of Geometry and the higher 
branches of Algebra, which he cautiously concealed. 
But the clouds were gathering fast, for his master 
was roused to a terrific pitch of anger by his indif- 
ference to his concerns, and the daily reports which 
were brought to him of his attempts at versification. 
He was required to give up his papers, and when 
he refused his garret was searched, and his small 
hoard of books discovered and confiscated. This 
was a severe blow, but it was followed by one more 
severe, which was the death of the old schoolmaster 
whose succession he had counted upon, and the ap- 
pointment in his place of a person not much older 
than himself, and certainly not so well qualified. 

The doggerel of our young shoemaker, which 
passed from mouth to mouth among people of his 
own degree, came to the knowledge of Mr. William 
Cookesley, a surgeon of Ashburton, and gave him 
curiosity to inquire after the author. He sent for 
the lad, who told him his little history, and he at 
once set to work to console and aid him. There 
were difficulties in the way, however, one being his 
apprenticeship, which still had eighteen months to 
run, others being his want of education, the bad- 
ness of his handwriting, and the incorrectness of 
his language. But they did not deter this kind- 
hearted man, who procured some of his poems, dis- 



THE EAELY YEAKS OF GIFEOKD 101 

persed them among bis friends and acquaintances, 
and opened a subscription for his relief. It was 
headed, " A subscription for purchasing* the re- 
mainder of the time of William Gifford, and for 
enabling him to improve himself in writing and 
English grammar ; " and though few contributed 
more than five shillings, and none beyond ten and 
sixpence, enough was raised to free him from his 
bondage to the awl and last, his master receiving six 
pounds to cancel his indentures. He was then 
placed with a friendly clergyman, under whose in- 
struction he made more progress than his patrons 
had expected, greatly to the satisfaction of his bene- 
factor, who had now become his father as well as 
friend, and who persuaded his other patrons to re- 
new their subscriptions. At the end of little more 
than two years after his emancipation he procured 
the place of Biblical Keader at Exeter College, Ox- 
ford, where he soon became capable of reading 
Latin and Greek with facility, and where he turned 
his attention to a translation of Juvenal, which, as 
it was not published for more than twenty years, 
need not detain us now. His next patron (for Mr. 
Cookesley died in his twenty-fifth year) was Earl 
Grosvenor, who, receiving a letter which Gifford 
had written to a friend in his care, but had omitted 
the direction, supposing it was addressed to him- 
self, opened it and read it. But Gifford shall tell 



102 THE EARLY YEAES OF GIFFOED 

the rest of the story : " There was something in it 
which attracted his notice, and when he gave it to 
my friend he had the curiosity to inquire about his 
correspondent at Oxford ; and, upon the answer he 
received, the kindness to desire that he might be 
brought to see him upon his coming to town. To 
this circumstance, purely accidental on all sides, 
and to this alone, I owe my introduction to that 
nobleman. On my first visit he asked me what 
friends I had, and what were my prospects in life ; 
and I told him that I had no friends and no pros- 
pects of any kind. He said no more ; but when I 
called to take leave, previous to returning to college, 
I found that this simple exposure of my circum- 
stances had sunk deep into his mind. At parting, 
he told me that he charged himself with my present 
support and future establishment ; and that till 
this last could be effected to my wish, I should 
come and reside with him. These were not words, 
of course ; they were more than fulfilled in every 
point. I did go and reside with him ; and I ex- 
perienced a warm and cordial reception, a kind and 
affectionate esteem that has known neither diminu- 
tion nor interruption, from that hour to this, a pe- 
riod of twenty years." 

Such were the early years of William Gifford, as 
described by himself in the Introduction prefixed to 
his translation of Juvenal, and that they embittered 



THE EAELY YEAES OF GIFFOKD 103 

his character is not to be wondered at, however 
much it may be regretted. But there was more 
than one Gifford. There was the crabbed scholar 
who translated Juvenal ; the contemptuous satirist 
who broke the poor little butterflies of Delia Crusca 
on the wheel ; the querulous and quarrelsome edi- 
tor of Massinger and Ben Jonson ; and, worst of all, 
the brutal editor of the Quarterly. And there was 
still another Gifford — the one whom posterity, 
which has forgiven and forgotten much in him, is 
willing to think kindly of — Gifford, the poet, who 
remembered that he was once young in his Notes to 
his Baviad and Mseviad, and softened their sav- 
agery with three tender lyrics, the last of which I 
will quote : 

The Grave of Anna. 

I wish I was where Anna lies, 

For I am sick of lingering here ; 
And every hour Affection cries 

Go, and partake her humble bier. 

I wish I could ! For when she died 

I lost my all, and life has proved, 
Since that sad hour, a dreary void, 

A waste unlovely and unloved. 

But who, when I am turned to clay, 

Shall duly to her grave repair, 
And pluck the ragged moss away, 

And weeds that have no business there ? 



104 THE EAELY YEAES OF GIFFORD 

And who, with pious hand, shall bring 
The flowers she cherished — snowdrops cold, 

And violets that unheeded spring, 
To scatter o'er her hallowed mould ? 

And who, when memory loves to dwell 

Upon her name forever dear, 
Shall feel his heart with passion swell, 

And pour the bitter, bitter tear ? 

I did it ; and, would fate allow, 

Should visit still, should still deplore ; 

But health and strength have left me now, 
And I, alas, can weep no more. 

Take then, sweet maid, this simple strain, 

The last I offer at thy shrine ; 
Thy grave must then undecked remain, 

And all thy memory fade with mine. 

And can thy soft, persuasive look, 
Thy voice, that might with music vie, 

Thy air, that every gazer took, 
Thy matchless eloquence of eye ; 

Thy spirits, frolicsome as good, 
Thy courage, by no ills dismayed, 

Thy patience, by no wrongs subdued, 
Thy gay, good-humor— can they fade ? 

Perhaps — but sorrow dims my eye ; 

Cold turf, which I no more must view, 
Dear name, which I no more must sigh, 

A long, a last, a sad adieu ! 



ROBERT BLOOMFIELD 

There is a charm, a fascination, a spell in the writ- 
ing of verse that exceeds that which besets all other 
intellectual exercises, and something very like mad- 
ness, if it be not madness itself, that creates and 
supports the determination to persist therein at any 
and every cost. 

1 ' There is a pleasure in poetic pains 
Which only poets know." 

They may not be good poets, frequently they are 
not ; they need not be poets at all ; all that is 
necessary is that they should be possessed with a 
desire to rhyme, and convinced of their capacity to 
do so. That there is a great difference between 
poetry and prose the most unlettered are ready to 
admit ; but what constitutes this difference, except 
that prose may be written anyhow, while poetry 
must be written in lines which will scan, and which, 
as a rule, should rhyme with one another, is an arti- 
cle of belief with the majority of writers and read- 
ers. That certain moods of mind and trains of 



106 EOBERT BLOOMFIELD 

thought, certain emotions and passions, are essen- 
tially poetic, and that others, which are equally 
vivid and lucid, equally tender and poignant, are es- 
sentially prosaic — this, which ought to be the first 
of lessons, both for rhymesters and poets, is gener- 
ally the last that is learned by either, so confused 
and contradictory are the received poetic creeds and 
the accepted poetic practices. There would be fewer 
poets than there are if the knowledge that poetry is 
the profoundest of arts, and not the shallowest of 
impulses, was as widespread and as potent as it 
should be ; for it is not to fulness of knowledge but 
density of ignorance that we must lay the unneces- 
sary parentage of threshers like Stephen Duck, 
milk-women like Ann Yearsley, and farmers' boys 
like Eobert Bloomfield. To consider these writers, 
and the class of uneducated poets to which they be- 
long, as of any serious consequence in literature, is 
to consider them too curiously, since they seldom or 
never repay the patience and the pains that are ne- 
cessary to read them ; not to insist upon the loss of 
time of which we are conscious during the reading. 
We forget them as poets, but remember them as 
persons, partly on account of the mental delusions 
under which they labored, and partly on account of 
their calamitous lives. They point a moral and 
adorn a tale as surely as Otway, or Lee, or Chatter- 
ton, or old Thomas Churchyard, whose epitaph for 



EOBEET BLOOMFIELD 107 

himself might well serve for theirs, and be, if any- 
thing can be, a warning to others : 

" Poetry and poverty this tomb doth enclose ; 
Wherefore, good neighbors, be merry in prose." 

The career of Eobert Bloomfield was a melan- 
choly one, of a kind that was not uncommon in the 
last century among the laboring classes of England, 
who were born in a poverty which they could no 
more escape than the beasts of the field the burdens 
that were laid upon them, and who had nothing to 
look forward to, when they were broken down with 
toil, but death, or the parish poorhonse. He was 
born on December 3, 1766, at Honington, Suffolk, 
the son of a tailor, who died when he was a year 
old, leaving a family of six children, and a disconso- 
late widow, who must needs marry again when Rob- 
ert was seven, and have another family. She kept 
the village school, and, while instructing the chil- 
dren of her neighbors, managed to instruct her own 
little brood, the youngest of whom learned to read 
almost as soon as he could speak. Reading was 
probably all she could teach him, for such knowl- 
edge of penmanship as he had he picked up from a 
schoolmaster at Ixworth, under whose tuition he re- 
mained only two or three months, never going to 
another master. When he was eleven he was taken 
by a brother-in-law of his mother, who had a farm 



108 ROBEET BLOOMFIELD 

in the adjacent village of Sapiston, who in addition 
to the sum of one shilling and sixpence a week, 
which it was customary for farmers to pay such 
boys, agreed to take him into the house, no doubt 
on account of the relationship, saving his mother 
from other expense than that of finding him a few 
things to wear. He was so small of his age it was 
thought he would never be able to earn his living 
by hard labor. So he became that doer of odd 
chores, that miscellaneous factotum, a farmer's boy. 

Two of the elder Bloomfield boys were working at 
trades in London, Nathaniel being a tailor like his 
father before him, and George a shoemaker ; and 
to them their mother wrote before long respecting 
their brother Eobert. George promised to take the 
boy if she would let him have him, and Nathaniel 
promised to clothe him ; so she took the coach for 
London with him, determining to place him herself 
in their hands. George Bloomfield met them at the 
inn where the coach stopped, and rather a queer 
pair of rustics that mother of forty-five and that boy 
of fifteen must have been, particularly the last, who 
was not bigger than most boys of twelve, and who 
strutted about dressed just as he was from keeping- 
sheep and hogs, his shoes filled full of stumps in the 
heels. He stared about him, boy like, and slipped 
up, for his nails were not used to a flat pavement. 

Charged to watch over him as he valued a 



ROBERT BLOOMFIELD 109 

mother's blessing, to set good examples for him, and 
to never forget that he had lost his father, George 
took his brother home with him. He lived in 
Pitcher's Court, Bell Alley, Coleman Street, in a 
house of the sort that was then let to poor people 
in London, with light garrets fit for mechanics to 
work in, into one of which garrets, where there were 
five shoemakers at work, and two turn-up beds, lit- 
tle Eobert was received. They were all single men, 
lodgers at a shilling a week each ; their beds were 
coarse, and the garret was far from clean and snug. 
Eobert was their man to get them what they want- 
ed to hand. At noon he fetched their dinners from 
the cook-shop ; if they wanted beer they sent him 
for it, and then assisted him in his work, teaching 
him the rudiments of cobbling. When the boy 
came every day from the public-house to take back 
the pewter pots, and hear what porter was wanted, 
he always brought yesterday's newspaper, which 
they used to read in turns until Eobert was among 
them, after which he mostly read for them, his time 
being of the least value. 

He frequently met with words in his reading 
with which he was unacquainted, and as he worried 
over them it occurred to his brother to buy for him 
a small dictionary which he saw on a bookstall, and 
which must have been badly ill-used since it cost 
him only fourpence. By the help of this he was 



110 EOBEET BLOOMFIELD 

soon able to read and understand the long speeches 
of Burke, Fox, and other orators of the time. He 
was also benefited by the preaching or lecturing of 
a dissenting minister named Fawcet, whose diction 
was modelled after that of Johnson's Rambler, 
and from whom he learned to pronounce what he 
called the hard, meaning no doubt the polysylla- 
bic, words. Books were scarce in the garret of 
these shoemakers, mostly consisting of those that 
came out in sixpenny weekly numbers, such as 
the History of England, the British Traveller, and 
a Geography. It was an era of periodicals, whose 
chief advantage to their readers was their cheap- 
ness. Among these was one called the London Mag- 
azine, which George Bloomfield took in, and which 
contained reviews of new publications. Robert was 
greatly interested in this department, as well as in 
the Poet's Corner, to which he became a contribu- 
tor of smooth verses, about village girls, returning 
sailors, and other important poetical personages. 
About this time there came into their garret an- 
other lodger, who was afflicted with fits, which so 
distressed Robert that the brothers changed their 
lodgings to Blue Hart Court, where in their new 
garret they found a Scotchman, who was a Calvin- 
ist instead of an epileptic, and who had a number of 
books, which, not particularly valuing, he lent to 
Robert, classics like Paradise Lost and The Sea- 



EOBERT BLOOMFIELD 111 

sons, and which the lad eagerly devoured, espe- 
cially the last, which was a revelation to him. 

Not long* after this the journeymen shoemakers of 
London rose in rebellion against their employers, 
the point in dispute between them being whether 
those who had learned the trade without serving 
an apprenticeship should be allowed to follow it, a 
question which the employer of George and Robert 
solved for himself by discharging every man who 
worked for him that had joined their clubs. Their 
acting committees got into the shop of this plucky 
Crispin, and, finding Robert there, threatened to 
prosecute his master for employing him, and his 
brother for teaching him. It was a pretty quarrel 
while it lasted — this case of early boycotting, but it 
frightened Robert so that he returned to the coun- 
try, where he was kindly received by his old master. 
At the end of two or three months he went back to 
London, where the employer of George undertook 
to receive him as an apprentice, and, the dispute in 
the trade being still undecided, to secure him from 
any consequences of the litigation. 

The brothers remained together until Robert was 
turned of twenty, when they separated, George 
going to Bury St. Edmunds, and Robert staying in 
London. It is not difficult to imagine his life during 
this period, since it could not have differed much 
from what it had been, nor during the four or five 



112 EOBERT BLOOM FIELD 

years that ensued, when, besides shoemaking, he 
studied music, and became a player on the violin, 
and when, following the example of his tailor 
brother, who had married a Woolwich woman, he 
married, just after his twenty-fourth year, the comely 
daughter of a boatbuilcler in the Government yards 
there. He wrote to his brother George that he had 
sold his fiddle and got a wife ; but, humanly speak- 
ing, he had better have kept his fiddle and not got a 
wife ; for the pair were so wretchedly poor and 
lived in such squalor that it was several years before 
they could get out of dirty furnished lodgings, and 
have a bed of their own. When that good fortune 
was reached, they lived in a room up one pair of 
stairs in a house in Bell Alley, where two pairs of 
stairs higher there was a light garret, where Bloom- 
field was allowed to sit and work with five or six 
others, and where he composed The Farmer's 
Boy. I say composed rather than wrote, for the 
whole of Winter and the greater part of Autumn 
was finished before a line of either was written. 
It was no uncommon thing for Bloomfield to carry 
hundreds of lines in his head, until he could 
find, or make, an opportunity to put them on paper. 
Composed under circumstances like these, The 
Farmer's Boy was at length completed, and the 
question arose what to do with it ? For whatever 
pleasure there may be in stringing rhymes together, 



ROBERT BLOOMFIELD 113 

even bad rhymes (and there must be a great deal, 
or so many men, women, and children would not in- 
dulge in that pastime), they are never strung to- 
gether for the writer alone, but are always meant to 
meet the eye of the public. The manuscript which 
was offered to several London publishers, who never 
looked at it, or had it looked at by their readers, 
but duly returned it when called for by the person 
who left it at their shops, was finally sent by George 
Bloomfield to Capel Lofft, to whom he wrote a 
simple, manly letter about his brother, and whom he 
asked to read the manuscript, and tell him what he 
thought of it. I know little about Mr. Lofft, of 
whom there is not much to know now, except that 
he was a writer of legal treatises, the editor of two 
books of Paradise Lost, which he annotated, and 
the editor and author of a five-volume collection of 
Sonnets in sundry European languages ; but he 
must have been a person of some distinction, or the 
manuscript would not have been sent to him, a 
gentleman of leisure, or he would not have read it, 
as well as kindly, considerate, independent, and not 
averse from forming an opinion of his own respect- 
ing the work of an uneducated and unknown poet. 
The Farmer's Boy was in Mr. Lofft's hands for 
more than a year, but it was in his hands to some 
purpose, for receiving it in November, 1798, a few 
days before Bloomfield was thirty-three, he pub- 
8 



114 EOBERT BLOOMFIELD 

lished it in March, 1800, in a superb quarto, with 
cuts by Bewick, and it was at once successful. 
Twenty-six thousand copies were sold in less than 
three years ; it was translated into French and 
Italian, and a part of Spring was rendered into 
Latin hexameters. "What the poets of the clay 
thought of it I have forgotten, if I ever knew, but 
Lamb, I remember, cared nothing for it : for writ- 
ing some months after its publication to his friend 
Manning, who had ashed him about it, he said : 
" Don't you think the fellow who wrote it (who is a 
shoemaker) has a poor mind ? Don't you find he is 
always silly about poor Giles, and those abject kind 
of phrases which mark a man that looks up to 
wealth ? What do you think ? None of Burns's 
poet dignity. I have just opened him, but he makes 
me sick." It was not in the nature of a man like 
Lamb to respect a man like Bloomfield. There was 
nothing in common between them, the one being a 
scholar and a thinker, the other an unlettered rus- 
tic, with a knack at versifying. The reputation of 
•Burns, who died four years before, prepared the 
way for a self-made rhymester like Bloomfield, 
whose temporary vogue prepared the way in turn 
for a little school of self-made rhymesters who sprung 
up around him. There are tracts of literature 
wherein, as in old, neglected pastures, mushrooms 
are sometimes found, and with these mushrooms 



ROBERT BLOOMFIELD 115 

hundreds of other fungi which are often mistaken 
for them by the ignorant and the credulous. 

Byron described Churchill as the comet of a sea- 
son. If I were to describe Bloomfield, it would be 
as a glow - worm, whose mild and fitful radiance 
twinkled awhile, and then went out in the dark- 
ness. When The Farmer's Boy appeared he was a 
Ladies' Shoemaker, working for a Mr. Davies, in 
Lombard Street ; but its success enabled him to re- 
move to a small house in the City Road. A little 
later the Duke of Grafton bestowed upon him the 
post of under-sealer in the Seal Office, concerning 
which I know no more than Thackeray did of the 
Pipe Office, when he wrote about Congreve. Its 
duties were light, but his health was so poor that he 
was not able to perform them, and soon resigned. 
His Grace then made him an allowance of a shilling 
a day, which his successor continued, Bloomfield 
adding, or trying to add, to that princely income by 
the manufacture of iEolian harps, and the writing 
of more verse, three volumes of which were pub- 
lished in the next four years — Rural Tales in 
1802, Good Tidings in 1804, and Wild Flowers 
in 1806. Then, by the advice of some of his 
friends, he went into the book trade, and soon be- 
came bankrupt. His health growing worse, his 
friends took him on a tour in Wales, the poetic 
fruits of which were given to the world in 1811, in 



116 EOBERT BLOOMFIELD 

The Banks of the "Wye. Later he went for a time 
to Shefford, in Bedfordshire ; and later, after re- 
turning to London, he went to Canterbury and 
Dover. Last of all, having become a hypochondriac 
and half-blind, he went again to Shefford, where, 
on August 12, 1823, he died in great poverty, 
leaving a widow and four children. His later 
writings were a History of Little Davy's New Hat, 
1817 ; May Day with the Muses, 1822 ; and Hazle- 
wood Hall, a Village Drama, 1823. Poetry was a 
fatal dowry in the Bloomfield family ; for, car- 
ried away by the example of Bobert, Nathaniel and 
George were both addicted to it, the last dying in 
wretched squalor about eight years after his famous 
brother. 

No British poet ever had a harder life than Bob- 
ert Bloomfield, whose misfortune it was to suffer 
from poetry and poverty alike. He cannot be said 
to have been worsened by his gift of verse, such as 
it was, but he can hardly be said to have been bet- 
tered by it, since it neither developed his character 
nor strengthened his mind. But perhaps it did all 
that could be expected, his mind being, as Lamb 
observed, a poor one, and his character a weak one. 
He was the creature of circumstances, crushed by 
inherited poverty, and cursed with a feeble consti- 
tution and constant illness. Nature does not make 
heroes out of sickly shoemakers only five feet four 



KOBEBT BLOOMFIELD 117 

inches high, still less great poets. We should re- 
member this in thinking of Bloomfield, as in read- 
ing his verse we should remember the period at 
which it was written. It was as different from our 
period, which is more poetical, as it was from the 
Elizabethan period, which was more poetical still. 
We should remember The Seasons when we read 
The Farmer's Boy, and thank our stars that the 
reign of descriptive rural verse is past. The verse 
of Bloomfield is deficient in poetic qualities, in grace, 
in tenderness, in imagination ; but it is simple and 
natural, and not without a certain unliterary charm. 
A passage from The Soldier Home in his May Day 
with the Muses, will show the quality of Bloom- 
field. 

My untried muse shall no high tone assume, 
Nor strut in arms ; — farewell my cap and plume ; 
Brief be my verse, a task within my power, 
I tell my feelings in one happy hour ; 
But what an hour was that, when from the main 
I reached this lovely valley once again ! 
A glorious harvest filled my eager sight, 
Half shocked, half waving in a flood of light ; 
On that poor cottage roof where I was born 
The sun looked down as in life's early morn. 
I gazed around, but not a soul appeared, 
I listened on the threshold, nothing heard : 
I called my father thrice, but no one came ; 
It was not fear or grief that shook my frame, 



118 ROBERT BLOOMFIELD 

But an o'erpowering sense of peace and home, 

Of toils gone by, perhaps of joys to come. 

The door invitingly stood open wide, 

I shook my dust, and set my staff aside. 

How sweet it was to breathe that cooler air, 

And take possession of my father's chair ! 

Beneath my elbow, on the solid frame, 

Appeared the rough initials of my name, 

Cut forty years before ! — The same old clock 

Struck the same bell, and gave my heart a shock 

I never can forget. A short breeze sprung, 

And while a sigh was trembling on my tongue, 

Caught the old dangling almanacks behind, 

And up they flew like banners in the wind ; 

Then gently, singly, down, down, down they went, 

And told of twenty years that I had spent 

Far from my native land. That instant came 

A robin on the threshold ; though so tame, 

At first he looked distrustful, almost shy, 

And cast on me his coal-black, steadfast eye, 

And seemed to say (past friendship to renew), 

" Ah ha ! old worn-out soldier, is it you ? " 

Through the room ranged the imprisoned humble bee, 

And boomed, and bounced, and struggled to be free, 

Dashing against the panes with sullen roar, 

That thrust their diamond sunlight on the floor ; 

That floor, clean sanded, where my fancy strayed 

O'er undulating waves the broom had made, 

Reminding me of those of hideous forms 

That met us as we passed the Cape of Storms, 

Where high and loud they break, and peace comes never : 

They roll and foam, and roll and foam forever. 



ROBERT BLOOMFIELD 119 

But Jiere was peace, that peace which home can yield ; 
The grasshopper, the partridge in the field, 
And ticking clock, were all at once become 
The substitutes for clarion, fife, and drum. 

There are touches in this which recall Goldsmith 
at his best, as in The Deserted Village. 



JOHN CLARE 

Of great poets since the race, emerging from 
savagery, discovered the worth of spiritual emo- 
tion and the charm of melodious words, there have 
been but few ; but of poets there have been many. 
There are poets, and poets. Precisely what poetry 
is no one has yet been able to define, it is mani- 
fested in so many ways, each being a mask behind 
which lurks the personality of the poet, now con- 
cealing and now revealing itself. Epical in Homer 
and Milton, dramatic in Shakespeare, theological in 
Dante, philosophical in Goethe, and misanthropical 
in Byron, it is a Proteus, which, absent nowhere, is 
nowhere present, " one and indivisible." With poets 
like these it is more than a royal inheritance, an in- 
exhaustible treasury of whatever was greatest and 
best in their hearts and souls ; with others it is 
merely a gift from Nature, who is bounteous now, 
and now niggardly. Every great poet is a great in- 
tellect ; for the mass of poets, who are divided into 
less, lesser, and least, intellect is not so much 
needed as impulse and inclination, aptitude and 



JOHN CLAEE 121 

persistence, and that strange confidence which is 
begotten of ignorance, and which the ignorant are 
prone to mistake for genius. Poetry was not a 
mental acquisition and development with Bloom- 
field and Clare ; it was an alms which Nature be- 
stowed upon them in a generous mood, to lighten 
the dark road they were to travel, and to console 
them in their misfortunes and sufferings. 

John Clare, the son of Parker and Ann Clare, was 
born at Helpstone, on July 13, 1793. The elder of 
twins, and so small when an infant that his mother 
said he might have been put in a pint-pot, his par- 
ents were the poorest of English poor, his father 
being a day laborer who, broken down with hard 
work and privation, became a pauper at an early 
age, and received an allowance of five shillings a 
week from the parish, while his mother, who was of 
a feeble constitution, was afflicted with dropsy. At 
the age of seven he was set to watch sheep and 
geese on the village heath, where he made the 
acquaintance of an old woman called Granny Bains, 
who had committed to memory a great number 
of old songs, which she used to sing to the little 
fellow, who kept repeating them to himself all day, 
and in whose dreams they hummed all night. Be- 
fore long he was promoted from watching sheep 
and geese to the rank of team leader, and to help- 
ing his father in the threshing barn. Exposure in 



122 *" JOHN CLAEE 

the ill-drained fields brought on an attack of ague, 
rallying from which he was sent into the fields 
again. Kecovering his health, he sometimes made 
by overwork a few pennies, which he hoarded for 
schooling, and which enabled him to attend an 
evening school in the winter. A favorite with the 
master, he was allowed the run of his small library, 
his reading ranging from Bonnycastle's Arithmetic 
and Ward's Algebra to Kobinson Crusoe. By the 
time he was fourteen or fifteen he had begun to 
write verse, which he showed to his mother, telling 
her that it was worth silver and gold. " Ay, boy, it 
looks as if it were," she said, though she thought 
he was wasting his time. He deposited his scrib- 
blings in a chink in the cottage wall, whence they 
were duly subtracted by his mother to boil the 
morning kettle. 

Clare's earliest known literary inspiration ante- 
dated these scribblings by a year or two. It came 
in the shape of Thomson's Seasons, which was 
shown to him by a companion, and of which he was 
eager to possess a copy. Learning that one might 
be bought at Stamford for eighteenpence, he 
begged his father to give him that sum ; but the 
poor man was not able to do so. By strenuous 
exertions his mother managed to raise sevenpence, 
and by loans from friends in the village he made up 
the deficiency. He rose before dawn the next Sun- 



JOHltf CLAEE 123 

day, and walked to Stamford, seven miles away, to 
buy the precious book, forgetting, or not knowing, 
that business could not be transacted there on that 
day. After he had waited three or four hours be- 
fore the book-shop, a passer-by informed him of that 
fact, and that the shop would not be opened until 
the next morning. He returned to Helpstone with 
a heavy heart, and next morning retraced his steps, 
and secured the book, which he tried to read on the 
way home, but met with so many interruptions that 
he clambered over the wall of Burghley Park, and, 
throwing himself on the grass, read it twice through 
before rising. Not long after this his father applied 
to the head-gardener of Burghley Park to employ 
John, and he was engaged for a three years' appren- 
ticeship, at the rate of eight shillings a week for the 
first year, and an advance of one shilling a week for 
each succeeding year. Parker Clare considered 
this a fortunate beginning for his son, but it was 
really a yery unfortunate one ; for it threw him into 
the society of a set of roystering rustics, who com- 
pelled him to go with them on their nightly visits 
to public-houses in the neighborhood, where he 
drank so much more than was good for him that he 
was overcome by it, and slept out in the open air 
on several occasions. Besides this addiction to bib- 
ulosity, of which he set the example, the head-gar- 
dener was of a brutal disposition, which circum- 



124 JOHN CLAEE 

stance probably accounts for Clare's running away 
from Burghley Park before he had been there a 
year, and walking, with a fellow-apprentice, twenty 
or thirty miles, until they found a nurseryman who 
gave them something to do. 

Homesick and destitute, the runaway apprentice 
returned to Helpstone, where be became a farm 
laborer, and where he won the ill-will of his neigh- 
bors, who did not approve of his shifty ways, and 
his habit of talking to himself as he walked. At 
twenty-four he was working in a limekiln for ten 
shillings a week, and in love with the daughter of a 
cottage farmer. But he was more desperately in 
love with the Muse, whom he had wooed much 
longer ; and in order to prove this love he resolved 
to publish a volume of his poems. So he saved up 
a sovereign, and issued a prospectus, in which he 
informed the public that the trifles which he wished 
to bring out could lay no claim to eloquence of com- 
position, most of them being juvenile productions, 
while those of later date were merely the offsprings 
of the leisure intervals which the short remittance 
from hard and manual labor afforded, and which he 
hoped would be some excuse in their favor. And 
so on, and so on. His artless and honest address 
was answered by subscribers for exactly seven 
copies ! They were not generous, those canny folk 
of the Fen country. A copy of this prospectus 



JOHN CLARE 125 

came into the hands of Mr. Edward Drury, a book- 
seller at Stamford, who called upon Clare at his 
home, and persuaded him to show him a few of his 
manuscript poems, with which he was so much 
pleased that he offered to publish a volume of them 
at his own expense, and give him the profits after 
the expense was deducted. 

Mi\ Drury sent some of Clare's verse to his 
friend, Mr. Taylor, a bookseller of London, of the 
firm of Taylor & Hessey, the publishers of Keats, 
and Mr. Taylor coming to Stamford in the autumn 
of 1819, met Clare, probably through the good of- 
fices of Mr. Drury, and invited him to meet him at 
dinner that day at the house of Mr. Octavius Gil- 
christ, a kind-hearted, hospitable grocer. Clare 
made his appearance at the dinner, clad in his lab- 
orer's clothes, and dropped into a chair, all meek- 
ness and simplicity. Gilchrist questioned him 
about his life and habits, offered him wine, which 
assuredly he had never tasted before (credulous 
Octavius !), and, when one of the party sang Auld 
Eobin Gray, noticed the tears stealing silently 
down his cheeks. Apart from the patronage of Gil- 
christ, it was a pleasant evening for Clare, and with 
it a fortunate one, for on the strength of it he was 
introduced to the world in the first number of the 
London Magazine, in January, 1820, where the fussy 
Gilchrist condescended to praise his rustic Muse. 



126 JOHN CLAEE 

Gilchrist's exploitation of Clare served as a pro- 
logue to bis book, which, under tbe title of Poems 
Descriptive of Kural Life and Scenery, was at once 
published by Taylor & Hessey, and was a success, 
both from a monetary and literary point of view. 
The first edition was exhausted in a few days ; a sec- 
ond speedily followed, and it passed through a third 
before the close of the year. It was praised in the 
Gentleman's Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, 
the Eclectic Keview, even in the Quarterly, " so sav- 
age and tartarly." Complimentary letters flowed in 
upon Clare, books were sent to him, and his influen- 
tial friends set about devising some means to bet- 
ter his conditioD. He was invited to Milton Park, 
where — after he had dined with the servants — he 
was received by Lord and Lady Milton, and Earl 
Fitzwilliams, who made him a handsome present. 
He was also invited to Burghley Park, where — after 
he had dined with the servants — he was received by 
the Marquis of Exeter, who promised to allow him 
an annuity of fifteen pounds for life. Pounds and 
patronage from the nobility and gentry opened the 
eyes of the cottage farmer to the merits of his would- 
be son-in-law, who was at once permitted to marry 
his daughter Martha. A subscription was started 
for the benefit of Clare by Admiral Lord Eadstock, 
who had met him at a dinner given to him in London 
by Mr. Taylor, and was liberally patronized, Taylor 



JOHN CLARE 127 

& Hessey heading it with a donation of one hundred 
pounds, Earl Fitz williams, the Dukes of Bedford and 
Devonshire putting down their names for twenty 
pounds each, and Prince Leopold, the Duke of 
Northumberland, the Earl of Cardigan, Lords John 
Eussell and Kenyon, Sir Thomas Baring, and others 
theirs for ten pounds, the whole list, with other les- 
ser subscriptions, making the sum of four hundred 
and twenty pounds. With an investment like this a 
peasant like Clare was tolerably well provided for. 

The success of Clare's first collection of verse led 
to the publication of a second, which was issued in 
the following year (1821), under the title of The 
Village Minstrel and Other Poems. It was in two 
volumes, and was embellished with his portrait, 
after a painting by Hilton, who seems to have 
caught his best expression, which was at once inter- 
esting and refined. In the spring of the next year 
he paid a second visit to London, where he was en- 
tertained by his publishers, who had become the 
proprietors of the London Magazine. There he made 
the acquaintance of some of its best contributors, 
men like Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, Thomas 
Hood, George Darley, and H. F. Cary, the transla- 
tor of Dante. The literary guild took to him as they 
seem never to have taken to Bloomfield, and dined 
him, wined him, exchanged books with him, and 
wrote him the kindest letters ; particularly Lamb, 



128 JOHN CLARE 

who, in an epistle penned at the India House, praised 
his second venture, telling him what pieces therein 
he liked, and warning him against a too great use of 
provincial phrases. The conclusion of this epistle 
is in Lamb's best vein: "Since I saw you I have been 
in France and have eaten frogs. The nicest little 
rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for 
them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters ; 
boil them plain with parsley and butter. The fore- 
quarters are not so good. She may let them hop 
off by themselves." If Clare's cronies did not teach 
him, they at least helped him, to drink deep ere he 
departed from London. He remained several weeks 
and then returned to Helpstone, where he found 
his wife dangerously ill, and where before long he 
was very ill himself, weakened by an insufficiency of 
food, and harassed by more than a sufficiency of 
creditors. 

In the spring of 1824 he paid a third visit to Lon- 
don, where to his list of old friendships he added 
De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Coleridge, and where he 
put his frail, suffering body in the hands of a kindly 
physician, who helped him to overcome his habitual 
and inordinate thirst. His third book, The Shep- 
herd's Calendar (1827), was a failure, partly, it may 
be, because it was brought out in a bad season, but 
more, it is to be feared, because the gloss of novelty 
was worn off his name and his verse. He was in 



JOHN CLAEE 129 

request, however, with the editors of Annuals, which 
had just begun their short-lived reign, and from 
which a few guineas were now and then doled out 
to him. 

The fortunes of Clare did not increase in the same 
ratio as his family, which, by the time he was thirty- 
eight, consisted of ten persons who were depend- 
ent upon him, six of whom were children. He tried 
once or twice to obtain a portion of the money which 
had been invested for his benefit years before, but 
without success ; for in cases of this kind the trus- 
tees in whose hands such moneys are lodged are al- 
ways sure that they are the best judges of the uses 
to which they should be applied — at any rate, much 
better judges than the poor devils for whom these 
moneys were originally raised. Clare might have the 
interest, but he should not touch the principal. 
Moved at last by the desperation of the poor poet, 
Lord Milton set apart for him a cottage at North- 
borough, a village three miles from Helpstone ; but 
when the day arrived that he should enter into pos- 
session of it, Clare was very reluctant to quit his 
old home. Not so his wife, concerning whom one of 
his biographers writes : " Patty, radiant with joy 
to get away from the miserable little hut into a 
beautiful roomy cottage, a palace in comparison 
with the old dwelling, had all things ready for 
moving at the beginning of June, yet could not per- 



130 JOHN CLARE 

suade her husband to give his consent to the final 
start. Day after day he postponed it, offering no ex- 
cuse save that he could not bear to part from his 
old home. Day after day he kept walking through 
fields and woods among his old haunts, with wild, 
haggard look, muttering incohereDt language. The 
people of the village began to whisper that he was 
going mad. At Milton Park they heard of it, and 
Artis and Henderson hurried to Helpstone to look 
after their friend. They found him sitting on a 
moss-grown stone at the end of the village nearest 
the heath. Gently they took him by the hand, and, 
leading him back to the hut, told Mrs. Clare that it 
would be best to start at once to Northborough, the 
Earl being dissatisfied that the removal had not 
taken place. Patty's little caravan was soon ready, 
and the poet, guided by his friends, followed in the 
rear, walking mechanically, with eyes half shut, 
walking as in a dream. His look brightened for a 
moment when entering his new dwelling-place — a 
truly beautiful cottage, with thatched roof, case- 
mated windows, with roses over the porch, and 
flowery hedges all round. Yet before many hours 
were over he fell back into deep melancholy, from 
which he was relieved only by a new burst of song." 
The poetical career of Clare was practically ended : 
for though he published another volume, The Rural 
Muse (1835), and gained a little money and praise 



JOHN CLARE 131 

by it, melancholy had now marked him for her own. 
His language grew wild and incoherent, and his 
memory failed so that he no longer recognized his 
wife and children. In his rational intervals he 
worked in his garden, or read and wrote in his little 
study ; but these intervals became fewer and fewer, 
until at last they ceased altogether. At length he 
was placed in a private asylum at High Beach, in 
Epping Forest, where, constantly employed in the 
garden, he grew stout and robust, and was allowed 
to stroll beyond the grounds of the asylum, and to 
ramble in the forest. At times he would converse in 
a sensible manner, but in the end he always lost 
himself in utter nonsense. He was possessed with 
the hallucination that he had two wives. The first, a 
young woman named Mary Joyce, with whom he had 
fancied he was in love before he met his Patty, the 
second being Patty, through whom he sent his love 
to the dear boy who had written to him, and to her 
who was not forgotten, and who had been dead for 
years. Once he made his escape from the asylum, 
and after wandering about the country for four days 
and three nights was so near starvation that he had 
devoured the grass in the fields. Finally he reached 
his home at Northborough, whence he was sent to the 
County Lunatic Asylum at Northampton, where he 
was supported by the generosity of the Fitzwilliams 
family, and treated as a " gentleman patient." Books 



132 JOHN CLARE 

and writing materials were furnished him ; he was 
considerately addressed as "Mr. Clare," and was 
permitted to walk in the fields, and go into the 
town whenever he wished. He had a favorite win- 
dow in the asylum commanding a view of the valley 
of the Nen, and a favorite seat in a niche under the 
roof of the portico of All Saints Church, where he 
sat for hours watching the children at play, and jot- 
ting down his fancies in a pocket note-book. At 
last he was so feeble that he was wheeled around 
the asylum grounds in a Bath-chair, and was heard 
muttering to himself, " I have lived too long," or 
" I want to go home." Just before the close of his 
seventy-first year, on May 20, 1864, his perturbed 
spirit entered into rest. 

The poetry of Clare is what might have been ex- 
pected from his long familiarity with rural scenery, 
and his intimate knowledge of country life. Simple 
as the song of a bird, it is best described by Milton's 
phrase, " native wood-notes wild," for art it has none, 
and only such music as lingered in the memory of 
Clare from the few poets that he had read. It 
abounds with picturesque details, which declare the 
naturalist as well as the poet ; it sparkles with happy 
epithets, and to those who delight in Nature for its 
own sake, and not for the human quality which the 
present race of poets are striving to infuse into it, it 
is winsome and charming. It is not the kind of 



JOHN CLAEE 133 

poetry to criticise, for it is full of faults, but to read 
generously and tenderly, remembering the lowly life 
of Clare, his want of education, his temptations, his 
struggles, his sorrow and suffering, and his melan- 
choly end. 

Here is something which he intended to be a son- 
net, and which is from his first volume : 

The Primrose. 

Welcome, pale Primrose ! starting up between 
Dead matted leaves of asli and oak, that strew 
The every lawn, the wood, and spinney through, 
'Mid creeping moss and ivy's darker green ; 
How much thy presence beautifies the ground ; 
How sweet thy modest, unaffected pride 
Glows on the sunny bank, and wood's warm side. 
And where thy fairy flowers in groups are found 
The school-boy roams enchantedly along, 
Plucking the fairest with a rude delight ; 
While the meek shepherd stops his simple song 
To gaze a moment on the pleasing sight ; 
O'erjoyed to see the flowers that truly bring 
The welcome news of sweet returning Spring. 

Here is something different, which is from the same 
volume, and is better known : 

To the Glow-worm. 

Tasteful Illumination of the night, 
Bright-scattered, twinkling star of spangled earth ! 



I 



134 JOHN CLAEE 

Hail to the nameless colored dark-and-light, 

The witching nurse of thy illumined birth. 

In thy still hour how dearly I delight 

To rest my weary bones from labor free ; 

In lone spots, out of hearing, out of sight, 

To sigh day's smothered pains ; and pause on thee, 

Bedecking, dangling briar and ivied tree, 

Or diamonds tipping on the grassy spear ; 

Thy pale-faced glimmering light I love to see ; 

Gilding and glistering in the dewdrop near ; 

O, still-hour's mate ! my easing heart sobs free, 

While tiny bents low bend with many an added tear. 



EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

If there be one intellectual quality which more 
than another should be regarded as Nature's best 
and greatest gift to man, it is that strange and 
beautiful thing which we call Poetry. Given to 
many in measures which correspond with their ca- 
pacity to receive it, and their power to exercise it, it 
is bestowed in its fulness only upon a few, who, 
without it greater than their contemporaries, with 
it are the greatest of the race. There have been 
great captains — Alexander, Csesar, Napoleon ; there 
have been great sculptors — Phidias, Michael An- 
gelo ; great painters — Raphael, Titian, Velasquez ; 
but only one great, only one world-poet — Shakes- 
peare. Why others who went before him, and 
others who came after him, are dwarfs in comparison 
is a question that we cannot answer, consider it as 
curiously as we may. Wherein they fell short of 
him we can discover, if we set about it wisely, and 
why they fell short is not far to seek, if we are fa- 
miliar with their lives as well as their works, with 
their personality as well as their poetry. Some 



136 EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

failed through not knowing what poetry is, some 
through not knowing their own powers, and some 
through their temperaments, which may have been 
too inert, or too active, too indolent, or too hasty. 
Many poets fail because they mistake impulses for 
inspirations, more because they do not value their art 
highly enough. If Byron had understood himself 
he would not have tried to write tragedies, nor do 
I think that Lord Tennyson would have done so 
either, if in his age he had not lost the clear sagacity 
of his young manhood. The fault of Shelley's po- 
etry, as I understand it, is a want of human interest ; 
and the fault of Browning's poetry, as I understand 
it, is a want of intelligibility. Both were overpow- 
ered by their individuality ; as, in a more common 
way, was Ebenezer Elliott, who ought to have been, 
but was not, the successor of Burns. 

The pedigree of Ebenezer Elliott was a stalwart 
if not a gentle one ; for, if the account of his grand- 
father may be trusted, his paternal ancestors were 
border thieves who lived on the cattle they stole from 
the English and Scotch, and prospered in the plenty 
that cost them nothing but courage. They ceased 
to levy their toll of beeves by, if not before, the 
middle of the last century, for toward its close one 
of their number, an Ebenezer Elliott, who had mar- 
ried the daughter of a rich farmer near Hudders- 
field, was in business as an iron-founder at Masbor- 



EBENEZEK ELLIOTT 137 

ough, in the parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire, where 
our Ebenezer, who was one of a family of eleven, 
was born. Ushered into this breathing world on 
March 17, 1781, he came very near being ushered 
out of it again, for in the confusion attending his 
birth he was placed in an open drawer, which was 
closed by someone who did not notice its occu- 
pant, for whom, when it was discovered that he was 
missing, there was an outcry, which caused the per- 
son who had last handled him to remember his 
place of deposit, and restore him to his many- 
childed mother. That the poet's father was not a 
dull, commonplace creature, may be inferred from 
the nickname by which he was widely known, 
" Devil Elliott," from his faith, which was red-hot 
Calvinism, and from his politics, which were, or were 
believed to be, of a Jacobin character. One of the 
poet's contemporaries, who was well acquainted with 
his father, relates an anecdote of this Jacobinical 
Calvinist, which was characteristic of the man as 
well as of the time in which he lived : " The Roth- 
erham troop of Yeomanry had a field day. It was 
getting toward evening ; and previous to the dis- 
missal of the men, they were drawn up in a line in 
High Street, with their faces to the Crown Inn, 
while some one was addressing a loyal speech to 
them from one of the windows. Mr. Elliott's shop 
being in the narrowest part of the street, and, from 



138 EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

some cause or other, one or more of the military 
steeds, which stood with their hinder parts toward 
his door and windows beginning to prance, they 
were not long before their tails and haunches came 
through the glass. The old man immediately con- 
ceived the idea that this was done on purpose, and 
because he was a Jacobin. Under this impression 
he flew into a terrible rage, seized, I believe, some 
offensive weapon which the stock in his own shop 
supplied, and rushed to the assault. A disturbance 
ensued but, no blood was shed ; and thus the affair 
did not end as seriously as it might have done, con- 
sidering what it was to quarrel with the authorities 
in those days. Probably Mr. Elliott's real respecta- 
bility in the eyes of his neighbors, together with his 
commercial influence in the town, protected him 
from similar consequences to those which befell the 
more unfortunate James Montgomery, at a little 
earlier date, in Sheffield." 

The elder Ebenezer is said to have possessed lit- 
erary talent, which manifested itself in a rhymed 
paraphrase of Job, and oratorical talents, which 
united and expended their powers along the lines 
of theology and politics. Under the room in which 
the poet was born there was a little parlor like the 
cabin of a ship, which was yearly painted green, and 
the walls of which were embellished with pictures, 
and there every fourth Sunday the doughty iron- 



EBENEZER ELLIOTT 139 

monger used to hold forth like another Boanerges 
to a select congregation, which came from a distance 
of twelve or fourteen miles to hear his tremendous 
doctrines of ultra Calvinism. On other days he 
would point to the portraits on the walls, and de- 
claim on the virtues of Cromwell and Washington, 
laughing heartily, and dilating on the splendors of 
the glorious victory of his Majesty's forces over the 
rebels at Bunker Hill. 

The childhood of young Ebenezer differed but lit- 
tle from the childhood of the ordinary English lad 
at the end of the last century. He went to a dame's 
school, where he was taught to read and write indif- 
ferently, and he had the small-pox, which was so 
virulent as to leave him blind for a time. At the age 
of nine or ten he was sent to a school in Sheffield, 
where he was so backward that his sums were done 
for him by the other boys. At last his father took him 
from this school, and placed him in another about two 
miles from Masborough, where he might have him 
more under his own eyes, and where he did no bet- 
ter, but rather worse, for during the summer months 
he was almost always playing truant in the woods 
thereabout, gathering wild flowers, robbing birds' 
nests, and rioting in other forbidden pleasures. 
Discovering this last delinquency, beside which his 
duncery was nothing, his irate parent concluded to 
make him an ironmonger, like himself ; so he placed 



140 EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

him in his shop, or foundry, or whatever it was, 
where he proved himself as clever as other begin- 
ners of his age, sixteen, and where he remained for 
seven years, receiving no wages, and hut little 
pocket money ; for if the elder Elliott was irate, he 
was also thrifty. 

Up to this time he had shown no inclination to- 
ward education, and no intellectual aptitude of any 
kind ; but one Sunday, when he happened to call on 
a widowed aunt — who must have been a remarkable 
woman, since she is said to have supported herself 
and three children on thirty pounds a year, and to 
have given two of them, who were boys, an educa- 
tion which made them gentlemen — calling upon 
this gentlewoman on that momentous Sabbath, he 
saw among her books a copy of Sowerby's English 
Botany, with which he was enraptured. " Never 
shall I forget," he wrote long afterward, " the im- 
pression made upon me by the beautiful plates. I 
actually touched the figure of the primrose, half 
convinced that the mealiness on the leaves was real." 
Sharing the pleasure which she had been the means 
of conferring upon him, his good aunt showed him 
how to reproduce the flowers by holding them up to 
the light, and copying them on thin paper. From 
Sowerby, who gave him a taste for botany, to 
Thomson, who gave him a taste for poetry, was but 
a step, and he took it after hearing his favorite 



EBENEZER ELLIOTT 141 

brother Giles read the first book of The Seasons. 
What arrested his attention in this reading was the 
description of the polyanthus and the auricula, with 
which he was so much struck that he seized the 
book, when Giles laid it down, and rushed into the 
garden, where he compared the verbal description 
with the actual flower. Before this he had never 
read poetry, which always gave him headache ; but 
now he began to read it, and write it, one of his 
best feats in rhyming being an imitation in heroic 
couplets of one of Thomson's descriptions of a thun- 
der-storm. He now began to read such books as he 
could procure, and as some of them, among others 
Ray's Wisdom of God, Derham's Physico-Theology, 
Young's Night Thoughts, and Barrow's Sermons, 
were of the old-fashioned, solid kind, he was in- 
structed if not entertained. "I never could read a 
foolish book through," he said afterward, " and it 
follows that I read masterpieces only." He was also 
and always an indefatigable reader of newspapers. 

The life of Elliott, though it extended nearly to 
the allotted age of man (he died in his sixty-ninth 
year), was not of a kind that can be enlarged into a 
complete biography, certainly not without much and 
ingenious padding ; so I will attempt none. Suffice 
it to say, then, that he married at Rotherham, and 
received a fortune with his wife, and that he in- 
vested this fortune, whatever its amount, in business 



142 EBENEZEK ELLIOTT 

— a business in which there were many partners, of 
whom his father was one, and which was already 
bankrupt beyond redemption. Here he passed sev- 
eral years in hopeless efforts, in hopeless hopes and 
yearnings, and here he lost his last penny, and be- 
came for a time a pensioner on the bounty of his 
wife's maiden sisters. Honest as well as proud, 
he was wretched ; but not being weak as well as 
wretched, he employed himself in writing poems, 
and in painting landscape views of the neigh- 
borhood. At length, by the generosity of his wife's 
sisters, he started in business once more, with a 
capital of one hundred and fifty pounds, and hav- 
ing no partner this time, for his father had died, he 
was successful. 

He removed to Sheffield, where, at the age of 
forty, he began life anew, began it seriously as a 
poet, and more seriously as a manufacturer of and 
dealer in iron and steel. His warehouse was a 
dingy little place, surrounded with bars of iron, 
with a bust of Shakespeare in the centre, and in the 
counting-room casts of Ajax, Achilles, and Napoleon. 
It was not a showy place, but it was so prosperous 
while Elliott occupied it, that he sometimes made as 
much as twenty pounds a day without stirring from 
his chair, or seeing the merchandise that he sold. 
There have been poets who would not have devoted 
themselves to business as willingly and strenuously 



EBENEZER ELLIOTT 143 

as Elliott did, and they are greatly to be pitied for 
their lack of sense. Burns was not one of those 
witless weaklings, for given the chance at money- 
making that Elliott had, he would have embraced it 
as Elliott did, and left the hostages that he had 
given to fortune in comfortable circumstances. He 
set a high value on his poetry, but a higher value on 
his manhood ; for singing for himself at first, he 
sang at last for the whole poetic race : 

" To make a happy fireside clime 
To weans and wife, — 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

The recognition of this great duty led young Master 
Shakespeare up to London, and kept elderly Mr. 
Elliott in Sheffield. 

Elliott's prosperity continued as the years went on, 
and as his sons grew up he took them into partner- 
ship with him, and busied himself, like the good cit- 
izen he was, with whatever was calculated to advance 
the interests and welfare of his fellow-townsmen, 
becoming an active member of their Mechanics' In- 
stitute, before which he delivered a course of lectures 
on Poets and Poetry, and a fervid speaker on the 
political topics of the time, chief est among which 
was the Corn Laws, which to him, and those of his 
way of thinking, were the sum and substance of all 



144 EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

iniquity. As the issues which were involved in the 
Corn Laws were settled more than half a century 
ago, I shall not try to make their dead bones live ; 
for of all the things that once set men by the ears 
the deadest of all are dead politics. 

The time came when Elliott could afford a coun- 
try house ; so he took a handsome villa in the sub- 
urbs of Sheffield. Before him here was the prose 
of his life in the smoke of chimneys in the near dis- 
tance, and muffled noises that were wafted to him 
from bustling streets ; behind him was its poetry, 
for a path ran from the back of his house to a range 
of wooded hills and the verdant valley of the Rivelin. 
Labor and leisure and troops of friends — we may 
be sure that Elliott enjoyed himself at this time. 
But it was not to last long — the prosperity of 
poets never does last long ; so one day the pros- 
perity of Elliott forsook him, and calamity overtook 
him, in the shape of the great financial panic of 
1837, concerning which he wrote at a later day : " I 
lost fully one-third of my savings, and after ena- 
bling my six boys to quit the nest, got out of the 
fracas with about £6,000, which I will try to keep." 
To keep this remnant of his fortune Elliott left Shef- 
field and went to Hargate Hill, near Great Hampton, 
where, on land that he had purchased some time 
before, he built himself a substantial house. Here, 
as at Sheffield, he was visited by all sorts of people, 



EBENEZER ELLIOTT 145 

chiefly of the Corn Law and Chartist persuasion, to 
whom he was a celebrity. It is not given to many 
poets to be celebrities in their old age, and that it is 
not given to them is a circumstance not much to be 
regretted, whatever young poets may think, so heavy 
are the penalties which it entails upon them, and 
which are wrung from them by worshippers who 
force themselves upon them, many with impertinent 
questions, and nauseate them with senseless admira- 
tion and idolatry. During the last years of Elliott's 
life Hargate Hill was a Mecca to which swarmed 
hosts of pilgrims, and among them a Mr. George S. 
Phillips, who was an author in the sense that he 
wrote several books, one being a Memoir of Eben- 
ezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer. I have looked 
over this memoir at intervals, with every wish to 
find something therein that would put me en rap- 
port with Elliott, and I have found nothing that has 
done so. I knew this Mr. Phillips about twenty 
years ago, and the more I knew of him the more 
I wondered how Elliott could tolerate him, and the 
less I thought of Elliott. 

Having no confidence in the reminiscences of this 
slovenly and shabby Boswell, whose inaccuracy was 
surpassed only by his imagination, I will close this 
imperfect sketch of Elliott's life with a brief extract 
from a letter from his son Francis, written short- 
ly after his death, which occurred on December 1, 
10 



146 EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

1849, his sixty-ninth year : " The last month of his 
life was one of great torture and equal fortitude ; 
and he died in the presence of his family early on 
the morning of the first of December, and was 
buried in great privacy, as he wished to be, in the 
churchyard of the beautiful little village of Darfield. 
The tower of the church can be seen from the 
windows of his house, and forms a distinguishing- 
feature in a landscape that was dear to his eyes." 

It is difficult to fix the poetic place of Elliott, for 
the reason that there is no known definition of poe- 
try which does not suggest and require additions 
and deductions, and the further reason that he is so 
different at different times that one cannot but hes- 
itate in the attempt to determine his actual form 
and pressure. To say that he has written badly is 
only to say what has been said over and over again 
of Burns and Byron. But neither Burns nor Byron 
ever wrote so badly as he, nor with such persist- 
ence. Unlike their bad writing, which was acciden- 
tal, his bad writing seems to have resulted from the 
system that he pursued, partly, no doubt, through 
ignorance, but more through obstinacy — the obsti- 
nacy which mistakes itself for originality. He was 
not so much an uneducated poet as a mis -edu- 
cated poet. He may have read only masterpieces, 
as he claimed, but if so he read them amiss, since 
he learned nothing from them. His admiration of 



EBENEZER ELLIOTT 147 

Byron, which was life-long, was of Byron at his 
worst, for Byron taught him to rail and curse, not 
to reflect and meditate. He was fain to tell stories 
in verse, and his stories, in the hands of Byron, if 
Byron could have forgotten to be romantic, or the 
hands of Crabbe, who could not be romantic, might 
have been interesting. But in his hands they were 
not interesting, and if one reads his Splendid Vil- 
lage now, or his Village Patriarch, it can only be 
by an effort which soon becomes wearisome, and at 
last intolerable. He has no narrative talent. The 
movement of his verse, which was uncertain, was 
perpetually wasting itself in needless digressions — 
noisy with exclamations, and turbid with the sedi- 
ments of passion. He was interested in humanity, 
as all poets are, but not so much in its still, sad 
music as in the crash of its thunder and the long, 
tumultuous roll of its billows. He could not love 
the poor without hating the rich, not knowing, or 
caring to know, that the rich should no more be 
hated as a class for being rich, than the poor should 
be pitied as a class for being poor. But he was no 
philosopher, for he felt more than he thought, and 
felt so vehemently that he was often unreasonable 
and unjust. It is not too much to say that he was 
generally in a rage when he wrote, and that his 
Muse was a common scold. This is what some of 
his contemporaries said of him, and it was true in a 



148 EBENEZER ELLIOTT 

measure. But it was not the entire truth, nor the 
truth generously stated, as it is by Professor Down- 
den in Ward's English Poets, to which the reader of 
this chat may turn at his leisure. 

Like most poets, Elliott is at his best when he is 
least ambitious. Not in such an epiclet as The 
Splendid Village, which one can read, though not so 
easily as The Deserted Village, nor in his Corn Law 
Rhymes, which also one can read, though not so 
easily as some of his lyrics and domestic pieces, say 
The Dying Boy and the Sloe Blossom, The Wonders 
of the Lane, or A Shadow. His fame, such as it is, 
rests mainly on the Corn Law Rhymes, of which this 
is, perhaps, as good a specimen as can be given. It 
purports to be a Song, that should be sung, if one 
cares to sing it, to the tune of Robin Adair : 

Child, is thy father dead ? 

Father is gone ! 
Why did they tax his "bread ? 

God's will be done ! 
Mother has sold her bed : 
Better to die than wed ! 
Where shall she lay her head ? 

Home we have none ! 

Father clammed thrice a week. 

God's will be done ! 
Long for work did he seek, 

Work he found none. 



EBENEZEK ELLIOTT 149 

Tears on his hollow cheek 
Told what no tongue could speak. 
Why did his master break ? 
God's will be done ! 

Doctor said air was best, 

Food we had none ; 
Father with panting breast 

Groaned to be gone. 
Now he is with the blest, 
Mother says death is best ; 
We have no place of rest — 

Yes, we have one ! 

The noblest piece of writing that Elliott has in- 
spired was written when the news of his death 
reached the shores of the New World. It was by a 
poet of the same order as he, but a much greater 
poet — John Greenleaf Whittier — and is a magnifi- 
cent eulogy of Elliott. 



DAVID GRAY 

If poetry be, as poets are fond of believing, the 
highest achievement of which man is capable, the 
bright, consummate flower of what is best and 
noblest in his nature, it is a flower which comes to 
perfection only in great minds. There is a class of 
minor minds which are fertile enough in producing 
growths which at first sight may appear to be poetic 
ones, but they are not from celestial seed, and how- 
ever they may flaunt in their bloom their vitality is 
brief. There is another class of minds which are 
equally fertile, and of which the growths seem more 
promising, but they are short-lived ; for if the seed 
from which they sprung was genuine, the soil in 
which it was sown was not vigorous enough to bring 
the seed to maturity. The fulness of health in 
strong minds, the disease of weak minds is poetry. 
There have been many weaklings in the history of 
letters, but they are not so frequent as they were, 
partly because a knack of turning rhymes is less 
esteemed than it was, and partly because the world 
has steeled itself against its Michael Bruces, Eobert 



DAVID GEAY 151 

Fergusons, Henry Kirke Whites, and David Grays. 
It may, in its sentimental moods, pity them as per- 
sons ; but it has ceased to think of them as poets. 
They mistook their desire for power — the desire to 
be poets, for the power which goes to the making of 
poets, and the mistake was never corrected. They 
might possibly have overcome their ignorance if 
they could have been made conscious of it ; but by 
no possibility would they have overcome their vanity, 
of which nothing would have made them conscious. 
The infirmity of the guild into which they forced 
themselves, vanity, was their disease — the incurable, 
mortal disease of which they perished. 

The life of David Gray has been related in a 
sketchy way by two Scotchmen, who were more or 
less acquainted with him, and who write of him 
with more enthusiasm than discretion. The sub- 
stance of what they tell us is as follows : He was 
born on January 29, 1838, at Duntiblae, a little row 
of houses on the south bank of the Luggie, about 
eight miles from Glasgow ; but was removed with 
his parents when a mere child to Merkland, on the 
north bank of this streamlet, about a mile from Kirk- 
intilloch. Merkland, like Duntiblae, was simply a 
group of humble wayside cottages, which were occu- 
pied by hand-loom weavers. In one of these cottages, 
which was one story high, with a slated roof, and a 
little kitchen garden in the front and rear, lived 



152 DAVID GRAY 

David Gray, the father of our David, who was the 
eldest of eight children, who may well be supposed to 
have crowded the cottage, when they were all gath- 
ered therein, for, divided by a lobby, or hallway that 
ran from the front to the back door, it consisted of 
but two apartments, the one to the right hand being 
fitted as a weaver's workshop, the other to the left 
being a stone-paved kitchen, out of which opened a 
tiny bedroom. 

Like many another poor Scotchman before him, 
and not a few, no doubt, since, the father of David 
Gray determined that his eldest son should become 
a scholar. Precisely what quality in learning, as 
they conceive of learning, leads such men to fancy it 
the best heritage they can bestow upon their chil- 
dren, passes ordinary comprehension. It is a delusion 
which costs them dearly, and costs their children 
more dearly still before they have done with it, as it 
did David Gray, who might have made a good hand- 
loom weaver instead of an indifferent poet. But it 
was not to be. So he was sent to the parish school 
at Kirkintilloch, where he learned to read, write, and 
cipher, which were useful accomplishments, and 
went later to the Glasgow University, where he 
pursued his studies, which, of course, had begun 
with Latin, living upon what he had saved out of the 
pittances he had received as a pupil - teacher and 
private tutor, and upon what his hard-working par- 



DAVID GKAY 153 

ents could forward to him from home in the shape 
of butter and oatmeal. 

The motive which actuated David Gray in the Uni- 
versity was not the motive which actuated his par- 
ents while he was there ; for they expected him to 
become a minister, while he expected to become a 
poet. A reader of verse from childhood, he soon 
betook himself to the writing of verse — a pursuit in 
which he was encouraged by the editor of the Glas- 
gow Citizen, who printed his poetic firstlings, as he 
had printed those of Alexander Smith some years 
before. His poetizing was not kindly received at 
home, whither he went every Saturday night in or- 
der to spend the Sabbath with the old people, his fa- 
the affecting an indifference toward it which he is 
thought not to have felt, while his mother bewailed 
and lamented it, her cry being : " The kirk, the free 
kirk, and nothing but the kirk." 

His Sabbaths at Merkland could not have been as 
pleasant to David Gray as his week-days in Glasgow, 
where he had several literary acquaintances, among 
whom was Mr. Eobert Buchanan, who was three 
years his junior, and who, like himself, was deter- 
mined to be a poet. They read together, planned 
great works, and wrote gushing letters to famous 
people. His twenty-second birthday found him out 
of employment, his term of service in the Free 
Church Normal Seminary, of which he was a Queen's 



154 DAVID GRAY 

scholar, having expired ; and it was necessary that 
he should obtain other employment— a circumstance 
of which he was promptly reminded by his parents. 
Yes, he must do something, and at once ; but what ? 
He had completed a longish poem about the Luggie, 
and the question was, how to get it published. He 
wrote to one of his friends : "I sent it to G-. H. 
Lewes, to Professor Masson, to Professor Aytoun, to 
Disraeli ; but no one will read it. They swear they 
have no time. For my part, I think the poem will 
live ; and so I care not whether I were drowned to- 
morrow." He wrote further: "I spoke to you of 
the refusals which had been unfairly given my poem. 
Better to have a poem refused than a poem unwrit- 
ten." 

That the men to whom he sent his poem really 
had not time to read it, should not have surprised 
him ; for if he had known the world a little better he 
would have known that their own affairs were natu- 
rally of more importance to them than the ungra- 
cious labor of reading manuscript from an unknown 
pen. The general tenor of what he wrote to them 
may be inferred from what he wrote about this time, 
or possibly a little earlier, to Mr. Sydney Dobell, 
who some nine years before had published a drama 
entitled The Eoman (1850), four years later a poem 
entitled Balder (1854), and a year later, during a 
residence in Edinburgh, a volume of Sonnets on the 



DAYID GRAY 155 

War. The world is not reading Mr. Sydney Dobell 
now, but thirty-two years ago he was a well known 
poet. The son of a prosperous wine merchant, 
whose business he followed, he resided at the Cleeve 
Tower, Cheltenham, to which place David Gray des- 
patched an epistle, which ranks among the curios- 
ities of literature. Here is an extract from it : 

" First : Cleeve Tower I take to be a pleasant 
place, clothed with ivy, and shaded by ancestral 
beeches ; at all events it is mighty different from 
my mother's home. Let this be understood dis- 
tinctly. 

" Second : I am a poet. Let that also be under- 
stood distinctly. 

" Third : Having at the present time only 8s. a 
week, I wish to improve my position, for the sake of 
gratifying and assisting a mother whom I love be- 
yond the conception of the vulgar. 

" These, then, are my premises, and the inference 
takes the form of this request. Will you — a poet 
— as far as you can, assist another, a younger poet (of 
twenty), in a way not to wound his feelings, or hurt 
his independency of spirit ? " 

That Dobell was not so profoundly impressed by 
this boyish braggadocio as Gray hoped he might be, 
but on the contrary so disgusted by it that he re- 
buked him sharply, is evident from a later letter, 
in which Gray endeavored to defend himself from 



156 DAVID GKAT 

the charges which his correspondent had brought 
against him, and of which the heaviest was probably 
his amazing self-confidence : " When my biography 
falls to be written," he said, "will not this same 
' self-confidence ' be one of the most striking feat- 
ures of my intellectual development? Might not a 
'poet of twenty * feel great things ? In all the stories 
of mental warfare that I have ever read, that mind 
which became of celestial clearness and godlike 
power, did nothing at twenty but feel. And I am 
so accustomed to compare my own mental progress 
with such men as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Words- 
worth (examples of this last proposition), that the 
dream of my youth shall not be fulfilled, if my fame 
equal not at least the latter of these three." 

Before long he changed his tune : " I am 
ashamed of what I wrote to you before," he said. 
" I was an actor then, not myself ; for, being bare 
of all recommendations, I lied with my own con- 
science, deeming that if I called myself a great man 
you were bound to believe me." 

If Gray had been a little older and a little wiser 
he would not have written such ridiculous letters, 
or writing them in his perpetual vacillations from 
vanity to modesty, he would have kept them until 
his sober senses returned to him, and then have 
thrown them in the fire. To be a foolish poet is 
not a crime ; but to be known as a foolish poet is a 



DAVID GRAY 157 

misfortune. It stood in the way of Gray at this 
time with Dobell, and it stood more, much more, in 
his way with others at a later day. Meanwhile, what 
was he to do ? He thought of starting a school with 
one of his friends, but as the project went against the 
grain it was abandoned. His friends in Glasgow 
advised him to connect himself with the press in that 
city, but no such connection could be made. Still, 
something must be done. What should it be ? He 
talked the matter over with his young friend Bu- 
chanan, and they resolved to go to London, where 
such geniuses as they were sure to be received 
with open arms. About three months after he had 
completed his twenty-second birthday (May 3, 
1860), Gray presented himself before Buchanan 
with his lips firmly compressed and his eyes full of 
fire, and exclaimed, "Bob, I'm off to London! " 

" Have you funds ? " demanded the practical Rob- 
ert. 

" Enough for one, not enough for two," was the 
canny reply. " If you can get the money, anyhow, 
we'll go together." 

Two days later Gray wrote to his parents: "I 
start off to-night, at five o'clock, by the Edinburgh 
and Glasgow Railway, right on to London, in good 
health and spirits." 

Gray and Buchanan agreed to go to London to- 
gether, but in making this agreement they forgot to 



158 DAVID GEAY 

state at which of the Glasgow stations they were 
to meet ; so, when the hour came, Gray left from 
one station and Buchanan from another. Precisely 
what befell Gray when he reached London is not 
known. He could hardly have been fool enough to 
spend his first night there in walking up and down 
Hyde Park, carpet-bag in hand, in the rain ; so we 
may conclude that he found a cheap lodging some- 
where, and, after a frugal supper, went to bed, 
whence he rose early next morning, and started on 
his quest among authors and publishers. He com- 
municated with Dobell, to whom he wrote a few 
days after his arrival : "I am in London and dare 
not look into the middle of next week. What 
brought me here? God knows, for I don't. 
Alone in such a place is a horrible thing. I have 
seen Dr. Mackay, but it's all up. People don't seem 
to understand me. . . . Westminster Abbey! 
I was there all day yesterday. If I live I shall be 
buried there — so help me God ! A completely de- 
fined consciousness of great poetical genius is my 
only antidote against utter despair and despicable 
failure." 

Gray and Buchanan met a week or so after their 
arrival in London, and Gray being dissatisfied with 
his lodging, which he declared was a cold, cheerless 
place, where he had only a blanket to cover him, was 
persuaded by Buchanan to share his room, which 



DAVID GRAY 159 

was the better of the two, though there were 
draughts everywhere in it — through the chinks of 
the door, through the windows, and up through the 
floor. Before quitting Glasgow Gray had written to 
Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes, the poet, and now he 
wrote to him again, reminding him that he had 
promised to read his poem ; telling him that he had 
travelled to London to give it to him, and to push 
his fortunes, and adding that he saw starvation be- 
fore him within two days. Should he send the 
poem, or bring it ? He asked, because he knew he 
did not want to be troubled with people of his sort 
coming about him. "Whatever you do, do it 
quickly, in God's name." The answer to this note 
was more gracious than it deserved, though just 
what might have been expected from so kind a man 
as Lord Houghton, concerning whom, at this junct- 
ure in the life of Gray, his accomplished biographer, 
Mr. T. Wemyss Reid (who first printed Gray's 
note), quietly says : "He did not write inviting him 
to send his manuscript to him — he did not even ask 
him to come to his house as a guest ; but within a 
couple of hours from the delivery of the touching 
note I have just printed, Milnes himself entered the 
humble lodging-house in the Borough, bearing with 
him a load of delicacies such as he believed the 
writer of such a letter must absolutely need. Hav- 
ing made some provision for Gray's subsistence 



160 DAVID GKAY 

while he remained in London, he took back to his 
own home the manuscript of the beautiful poem of 
The Luggie, which Gray had written, and upon 
which he was so anxious to have the opinion of his 
fellow-poet. A few days afterward, while he was sit- 
ting at breakfast in Brook Street, Gray was shown 
into his room. Milnes saw in a moment that some- 
thing was wrong, and by and by he extracted from 
him the fact that he had spent the previous night 
in the park. There had been no actual necessity 
to do so — there could have been none with Milnes 
in London — and the young man was in a state of 
hysterical excitement, and to indulge some morbid 
fancy of his own, had condemned himself to this 
terrible punishment — a punishment which laid the 
seeds of the fatal disease that carried him off a little 
more than eighteen months later." 

Mr. Eeid also mentions that before Gray was al- 
lowed to leave the house of Lord Houghton he was 
warmed and fed and clothed ; and he might have 
added that his fatherly helper made something for 
him to do by giving him manuscript to copy at the 
rate of a pound a week, and that he warmly recom- 
mended The Luggie to Thackeray for insertion in 
the Cornhill Magazine, wherein it would have been 
singularly inappropriate, as he could not but have 
known. 

The exposure to which Gray had so wantonly sub- 



DAVID GEAT 161 

jected himself during his mad night's outing in the 
park, brought on so severe an illness that he was at 
last willing to return home, as Lord Houghton had 
advised him to do from the beginning. He went 
back to Merkland, where he was sorrowfully re- 
ceived by his loving parents, and where, as the days 
went on he was visited by an eminent physician 
from Glasgow, a friend of his friend Dobell, who de- 
cided, after examining him, that with a continued 
residence there he had but little chance of his life, 
though his case he thought was far from hopeless, 
provided he could at once be removed to a warmer 
climate. He started a subscription for the purpose 
of sending the patient to South Africa, a benevolent 
act in which Lord Houghton promised to assist ; 
with the suggestion, however, that pending his re- 
moval to such a distance Gray should come to Tor- 
quay, where he himself would be able to look after 
his comfort. Gray accordingly went to Torquay, 
but he was so terrified by the sight of the consump- 
tive patients in the hospital that he fled from the 
place, and obtaining money from the house physi- 
cians, to whom he had been introduced, returned to 
Merkland. 

Days passed, weeks passed, months passed, and he 

knew that he could not live. He was ready to die, 

his life had been such a failure ; but he was not 

willing to die until he was sure his poems would bo 

11 



162 DAVID GRAY 

published. He worked over them, he copied them, 
he wrote to his friends about them — wrote so earn- 
estly, so yearningly, so sadly, that they raised 
money enough to publish them, Lord Houghton 
subscribing five pounds, and Mr. Dobell and other 
friends other sums. So they were placed in the 
hands of the printer, and a specimen page that be- 
gan " How beautiful ! " was sent to him. It reached 
him on December 2, 1861. When he saw it, his 
face lighted up, and the fame for which he had 
struggled was won. "It is good news," he said. 
The next day he died, his last words being, " God 
has love, and I have faith ! " His death was an- 
nounced to Lord Houghton by his father in the fol- 
lowing words : " Dear Sir : My son David died on 
Tuesday, December 3d, at two o'clock, afternoon. 
Born 20th January, 1838. Your obedient servant, 
David Gray." 

If there be a moral in the life of David Gray, 
I am not moralist enough to point it out. My 
business has been to tell the story of his life as 
simply as I could, extenuating nothing, and setting- 
nothing down in malice. I have known so many 
poets, old and young, that I have come to believe 
that I understand them as well as most men who 
write about them — much better, I think, than those 
who praise them too loudly, or dispraise them too 
feebly. I accept them for what they are, not for 



DAVID GRAY 163 

what I might wish them to be ; for whether we 
know it or not, they are a law unto themselves, 
and are their own excuse for being. The quality of 
David Gray's verse may be inferred from this un- 
studied sonnet : 

Now, while the long- delaying ash assumes 

The delicate April green, and, loud and clear 
Through the cool, yellow, mellow twilight glooms, 

The thrush's song enchants the captive ear ; 
Now, while a shower is pleasant in the falling, 

Stirring the still perfume that wakes around; 
Now, that doves mourn, and from the distance calling, 

The cuckoo answers with a sovereign sound, 
Come, with thy native heart, true and tried ! 

But leave all books ; for what with converse high, 
Flavored with Attic wit, the time shall glide 

On smoothly, as a river floweth by, 
Or as on stately pinions through the gray 
Evening, the culver cuts his liquid way. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 

Among the things which may be considered works 
of art, using the phrase in a sense that is wide 
enough to embrace engravings on steel and wood, 
casts in plaster as well as paintings in oil and water- 
colors, with whatever else of cunning workmanship 
comes under the head of bric-a-brac — among these 
things, I say, there is one which has been in my 
possession for more than a quarter of a century, 
and upon which I set a high value, because it was 
the gift of a friend of my early days, whose dust is 
now mouldering in the City of Flowers, and because 
it is a pictorial interpretation of the personages of 
a great poet, an old English poet, whom all his suc- 
cessors have delighted to honor — Geoffrey Chaucer. 
This treasure, for such it is to me, is a copy of 
Blake's Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. It is an 
engraving, whether on steel or copper I am not 
learned enough in engravings to state, about forty 
inches in length and ten inches in width, and it 
represents the Canterbury pilgrims as they started 
from the door of the Tabard Inn — a company of 



WILLIAM BLAKE 165 

old-time Englishmen, headed by the Knight, the 
Squire, the Yeoman, the Priest, the Nun, and the 
Abbess, who are followed by the Monks, the Par- 
doner, the Host, the Shipman, the Frankelin, the 
Man of Law, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, and the 
Clerk of Oxenford, the procession ending at the 
door of the inn with the Eeeve and Chaucer, all 
mounted, and all proceeding to the shrine of St. 
Thomas. All these figures are worthy of careful 
study, for the sake of Chaucer, of whose dramatic 
quality they are a curious revelation, and for the 
sake of Blake, of whose unique genius they are a 
strange manifestation. There is something in this 
engraving that arrests the attention at once, that 
holds it whether it will or no, and that refuses to 
be forgotten. It is not beautiful, though there are 
lovely and gracious things in it. It is homely and 
rude in many ways ; but rude or homely, lovely or 
gracious, it is characterized by a feeling that is 
inexplicable, a power which cannot be analyzed, 
and an imagination from which there is no escape. 
We seem, while we look at it, to be in another 
world than this workaday world of ours — an earlier 
world where men and women are more natural than 
they are here, where the hills and vales are more 
primitive, the clouds more fantastic, and the light 
in the morning sky more uncertain and visionary. 
Wherever I have lived since this picture has be- 



166 WILLIAM BLAKE 

longed to me, it has been with me, in the room in 
which I write, over the mantel, with books . to the 
right of it, books to the left of it, and books in 
front of it — poets and essayists, story-tellers and 
historians, and others in the heavy and light brigade 
of letters. I have looked at it until I know it by 
heart, and I never look at it without finding some- 
thing new in it, and thinking of Blake, whom I 
know better than I did when I first made his ac- 
quaintance through this strange work of his, and 
who, poet and painter, stands apart, alone and un- 
accompanied in the world of English art and song. 
Let me chat about him a little here. 

William Blake was born in London, in Broad 
Street, Carnaby Market, near Golden Square, on 
November 28, 1757. The second of a family of five 
children, he was the son of James and Catharine 
Blake, whose daily bread was obtained from the 
sale of hosiery. Nothing is known of his child- 
hood, except that his education was confined to 
reading and writing, and that he was fond of coun- 
try rambles. He took to drawing when he was ten 
years old, and to poetry when he was twelve, which 
was at too early an age for his lines in either direc- 
tion to fall in many pleasant places. His first essays 
in art consisted in copying prints, and his first 
knowledge of art in what he saw on the walls of 
salesrooms, which he haunted, and where he bought 



WILLIAM BLAKE 167 

engravings at low prices — not those which were 
then in vogue, for he cared nothing for those, but 
Eaphael, Michael Angelo, and other old masters, 
whose vogue in England was still to come. His 
artistic insight was in advance of his age, and far 
in advance of the age in which he lived. "lam 
happy," he wrote long afterward; "I cannot say 
that Eaphael ever was from my earliest childhood 
hidden from me. I saw and I knew immediately 
the difference between Raphael and Rubens." 
When he was fourteen he was apprenticed to James 
Basire, a well-known engraver, who was employed 
by the Antiquarian and Royal Societies, and by 
whom, when he was fairly instructed in his craft, 
he was sent to make drawings in Westminster 
Abbey. He sketched the tombs there, engraved a 
selection from his studies thereof, and made draw- 
ings from history and fancy. His chief pleasure 
during his apprenticeship was in making drawings 
and verses to be hung up in his mother's room. 
When his term had expired he studied in the An- 
tique School in the Royal Academy, where he ven- 
tured to differ from the keeper of the library, who 
did not share his enthusiasm for Raphael and 
Michael Angelo, whose work he considered inferior 
to that of Rubens and Lebrun. "Those etchings 
you call finished" Blake said to the librarian, " are 
not even begun ; how, then, can they be finished ? " 



168 WILLIAM BLAKE 

There is a story that Blake at this time, or per- 
haps a little later, waited upon Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds, to show him some of his designs, and that 
Sir Joshua, repelled by their extravagance, advised 
him to cultivate simplicity — a criticism which Blake 
never forgave. His apprenticeship over, he sought 
and obtained employment as an engraver for the 
Ladies' Magazine, and another publication entitled 
the Novelists' Magazine, in both of which he trans- 
lated into black and white the works of other artists, 
working at the same time for himself as his ambi- 
tion prompted him, in water- colors. The first artist 
of note whose acquaintance he made was Thomas 
Stothard, whose drawings were in demand among 
publishers for their loveliness and grace ; the second 
was John Flaxman, the sculptor, who was employed 
by the Wedgewoods, whose pottery work, enriched 
by his classic groups, was famous the world over ; 
the third was Henry Fuseli, a Swiss painter, who 
carried his admiration of Michael Angelo to an ex- 
travagance that was laughable when it was not re- 
pulsive. It is not well to look closely into the 
friendship of painters or poets, for with every desire 
on the part of both to fulfil their obligations to the 
letter as well as in spirit, they are so conscious of 
themselves that they cannot be thoroughly conscious 
of others, and so avid of appreciation that they de- 
mand more than they are willing to bestow. Blake 



WILLIAM BLAKE 169 

thought too highly of himself to think very highly of 
either Flaxman or Stothard, whom, in his moments of 
irritation, he accused of borrowing from him— justly 
or unjustly, we have no means of deciding. Fuseli 
admitted that he was good to steal from, which was a 
great deal from so opinionated a creature as Fuseli. 
In his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year Blake 
kept company with a young person named Clara 
Woods, whom he had not art enough to make love 
him, though she had art enough to make him jeal- 
ous. He complained of her treatment of him to his 
friends and acquaintances, and among others to a 
Miss Catharine Sophia Boucher, the daughter of a 
market gardener at Battersea, who told him that 
she pitied him from the bottom of her heart. " Do 
you pity me ? " he asked. " Yes, I do, most sin- 
cerely." "Then I love you for that," he answered. 
" And I," she declared, " love you." Miss Boucher, 
who was one of a family of five, was a slim and 
graceful brunette, with a pretty, expressive face and 
shapely white hands, such as artists like to draw or 
paint. Womanly in her ways, and with a certain 
rustic charm, she was uneducated, so much so that 
when, in her twenty -first year, she became the wife 
of Blake, she could only make her mark in the parish 
register. The marriage was distasteful to the father 
of Blake, so the young man left the paternal home in 
Broad Street, where he had resided up to that time, 



170 WILLIAM BLAKE 

and set up a house for himself and his wife in Green 
Street, Leicester Fields, where he went on with his 
engraving and painting in water- colors, and with a 
labor of love, which he at once undertook, and which 
consisted in teaching his wife to read and write. 

Not long after his marriage Blake was introduced 
by Flaxman to a Mrs. Mathew, the wife of a clergy- 
man, at whose house, in Rathbone Place, her friends 
and adherents used to gather at stated seasons, 
which were doubtless in the evening, and hold what 
were called conversazioni, which may be roughly 
Englished as social talks, the participants in which 
met to natter one another, and show themselves off, 
and exploit the fad of the hour, from Shakespeare to 
the musical glasses. Thither Blake went, leaving 
his wife at home, we suppose, for we are not told 
that she accompanied him ; and there he read his 
verses, and sang them ; for though he knew nothing 
of music as a science, he had set some of his verses 
to airs of his own composing, which were said to be 
singularly beautiful. His acquaintance with this lady 
was of service to him as a poet ; for it resulted in the 
publication of his first volume, the expense of which 
appears to have been borne by Flaxman and Mr. 
Mathew, the latter of whom wrote the preface to it. 

Blake's Poetical Sketches, which was published in 
1783, was not a book to attract attention, stealing 
into the world, as it did, amid a host of similar ven- 



WILLIAM BLAKE 171 

tures which no one pretended to read, not even the 
hacks whose business it was to report the poetry of 
the day in the magazines, and violating, as it did, 
all the received standards of poetical taste. It ap- 
peared in one of those intervals which occur in all 
literatures — one of those interregnums between 
dynasties whose power has departed and dynasties 
whose power is approaching, between the line of 
prosaic poets of whom Dryden and Pope were the 
chiefs, and the line of poetic poets, which, begin- 
ning with Wordsworth and Coleridge, still occu- 
pies the throne of English song. Blake antedated 
Cowper, the Cowper of The Task, by two years, and 
the Burns of The Cotter's Saturday Night, and The 
Twa Dogs, by four years. He was not a poet in 
the sense that the Bard of Olney and the Ayrshire 
Plowman were poets ; but there are lyrics in his 
Poetical Sketches, which were written between his 
twelfth and twentieth years (1769-1777), which sur- 
pass anything of the kind since the reigns of Eliza- 
beth and James. Here is one which has the flavor 
of the old dramatists, the greatest of whom might 
have been proud to own it : 

Song. 

My silks and fine array, 

My smiles and languished air, 

By love are driven away ; 
And mournful lean Despair 



172 WILLIAM BLAKE 

Brings me yew to deck my grave; 
Such, end true lovers have. 

His face is fair as Heaven 

When springing buds unfold ; 
Oh, why to him was't given, 

Whose heart is wintry cold ? 
His breast is love's all-worshipped tomb, 
Where all love's pilgrims come. 

Bring me an ax and spade, 

Bring me a winding-sheet ; 
When I my grave have made, 

Let winds and tempests beat : 
Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay, 
True love doth pass away! 

The year after the publication of the Poetical 
Sketches Blake changed his abode from Green 
Street, and, entering into partnership with a man 
named Parker, opened a shop as an engraver and 
print seller in Broad Street, next door to his brother 
James, who, on the death of their father, had suc- 
ceeded to his hosiery business. With William went 
his younger brother, Kobert, whom he had taken as 
a pupil, and who began to make original designs, as 
did also his wife, to whom he succeeded in impart- 
ing an art education that was serviceable to both. 
At the end of two or three years Kobert died, and 
very happily, as it would seem, since William saw 
his soul ascend through the ceiling, clapping its 



WILLIAM BLAKE 173 

hands for joy. Parted from William in the flesh, 
Robert remained near him in spirit, ministering to 
him and teaching him in visions of the night how to 
bring out his poems, which he was too poor to pub- 
lish at his own expense, and with them the designs 
which they had suggested, and which could not be 
said to elucidate their meaning. The method em- 
ployed, which was simple enough when once revealed, 
or invented, consisted of a kind of engraving in re- 
lief of the words and the pictures. This process, as 
described by Gilchrist, in his Life of Blake, was as 
follows : " The verse was written, and the designs 
and marginal embellishments outlined on the cop- 
per with an impervious liquid — probably the ordi- 
nary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the 
white parts or lights (the remainder of the plate, that 
is), were eaten away with aqua fortis or other acid, so 
that the outline of letter and design was left promi- 
nent, as in stereotype. From these plates he printed 
off in any tint — yellow, brown, blue — required to be 
the prevailing (or ground) color in his fac-similes ; 
red he used for the letter press. The page was then 
colored up by hand in imitation of the original draw- 
ing, with more or less variety of detail in the local 
hues." 

By this process Blake produced his books, begin- 
ning with Songs of Innocence, in 1789, and ending 
with Milton, in 1804. They numbered fifteen, only 



174 WILLIAM BLAKE 

two of which can be said to possess any poetical 
merit, the remainder either soaring above or sinking 
below the comprehension of ordinary readers of po- 
etry. They defy classification and evade analysis, 
satisfying no intelligent comprehension in the read- 
ing, and affording no clue to their immediate or ulti- 
mate object. Some purport to be prophetic, but of 
what we have to conjecture ; others, like The Book of 
Thel and Tiriel, purport to be narratives or histories 
of mysterious persons in unknown places, " out of 
space, out of time." If they remind us of anything in 
English letters, it is of Ossian, whose shadows exer- 
cised a curious fascination over uncritical minds, 
which mistook vagueness for sublimity, and turgid 
modern prose for an ancient poetical form. That 
Blake should have been captivated by the Ossian fad 
is not to be wondered at when we remember that 
it captivated Coleridge and Byron in their younger 
days, and a greater than both in a more stirring field 
than that of song — Napoleon Bonaparte. 

If we wish to understand Blake as a poet, we must 
discard his Ossianic and prophetic aberrations, and 
read him as we would any other poet, not when he 
is at his worst, but when he is at his best, in his 
Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience, which 
was published five years later. Here we find a poet 
who differed from all his contemporaries, who had 
no predecessor, and has had no successor, but who 



WILLIAM BLAKE 175 

was altogether unique, original and individual, primi- 
tive and elemental. The qualities which distinguish 
his verse at this time were simplicity and sincerity, 
sweetness and grace, an untutored, natural note 
which reminds one of the singing of a child who 
croons to himself in his happy moments, not know- 
ing how happy he is, wise beyond his years, superior 
to time or fate. They seem never to have been writ- 
ten, but to have written themselves, they are so 
frank and joyous, so inevitable and final. The spell 
begins with the artless Introduction to the Songs 
of Innocence (Piping Down the Valleys Wild), The 
Lamb, Holy Thursday, and On Another's Sorrow, 
and continues in the Songs of Experience, with the 
Introduction, and Earth's Answer, The Fly, and that 
tremendous lyric, The Tiger, which to read once is 
to remember forever. We are grateful to brother 
Robert, who taught Blake the method by which 
the poems could be translated from manuscript to 
print ; to St. Joseph, who revealed to Blake the pro- 
cess by which he mixed his colors ; and to helpful 
Mrs. Blake, who, under her husband's direction, col- 
ored the designs and bound the books in boards. 

The life of Blake, which has been related in two 
volumes by the late Mr. Alexander Gilchrist (1863), 
and by Mr. William Michael Rossetti, in a brief me- 
moir contributed by him to the Aldine Edition of 
Blake's Poetical Works, was devoid of incidents 



176 WILLIAM BLAKE 

that attract biographers, in that they are not strik- 
ing, however characteristic they may be of his per- 
sonality, and however much they may direct or de- 
fend the current of his days. He was one of those 
men who live for themselves more than their art, 
one of those strange men with whom art is so much 
a part of themselves that they never heed where 
either begins or ends — an egotist, an enthusiast, a 
visionary. He was the kind of man that his fellows 
never quite understand ; it may be because they 
assume that they are superior to him in worldly 
knowledge, which most of them are without doubt, 
or because he irritates and angers them with his 
self-sufficiency and arrogance. To differ from the 
majority of mankind is to challenge their good sense, 
delay their appreciation, and destroy their sympa- 
thy. Opinionated and determined, Blake would 
not be helped except in his own way, nor could he 
be helped long in that way, he was so impulsive and 
impolitic, so fractious and unreasonable. He was 
poor all his life, in spite of the diligence with which 
he plied his craft, and there were times when his 
scanty subsistence depended on the bounty of his 
friendly patrons, one of whom filled his house with 
his water-colors. 

The death of the poet Cowper in the spring of 
1800, was the indirect cause of Blake's quitting the 
chartered banks of the Thames, and spending three 



WILLIAM BLAKE 177 

or four years in the country. This rural residence 
resulted from his introduction by Flaxman to Mr. 
William Hayley, a gentleman of fortune who ranked 
among the poets of the day through an elegant but 
feeble poem, entitled The Triumphs of Temper, and 
who undertook to write a Life of Cowper, with 
whom he had been acquainted. He styled himself 
" The Hermit of Eartham," from a seat which he 
had at Eartham, in Sussex, to which he invited 
Blake, to make illustrations for the Life of Cow- 
per. Adjacent to Eartham was a little seaside vil- 
lage called Felpham, where he had a turreted ma- 
rine cottage, near which was a smaller cottage 
which he rented to Blake for twenty pounds a year, 
and into which Blake moved with his wife and sis- 
ter, despatching thence an epistle to his friend 
Flaxman, whom he addressed as his " Dear Sculp- 
tor of Eternity." As the spirit of this letter is 
significant of the mental condition of the writer, a 
passage from it may not be amiss here : " And now 
begins a new life, because another covering of earth 
is shaken off. I am more famed in Heaven for my 
works than I could well conceive. In my brain are 
studies and chambers filled with books and pictures 
of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eter- 
nity before my mortal life ; and these works are 
the delight and study of archangels. Why, then, 
should I be anxious about the riches or fame of 
13 ... 



178 WILLIAM BLAKE 

mortality ? The Lord our Father will do for us and 
with us according to his divine will, for our good. 
You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel, my 
friend and companion from eternity. In the divine 
bosom is our dwelling-place. I look back into the 
regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient 
doings before this earth appeared in its vegetated 
mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I can see 
our houses of eternity, which can never be sepa- 
rated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the 
remotest corners of Heaven from each other." 

That Blake and Hayley could not get on together, 
however they may have sought to do so, and how- 
ever great the allowance that each made for the 
other, was inevitable ; for gentle and generous as 
Hayley was, the vagaries of Blake could not fail to 
triumph over his temper. They parted at last, and 
Blake returned to London in the spring of 1808 
(the visions being angry with him at Felpham), and, 
taking a lodging in South Molton Street, soon pro- 
duced three extraordinary works, at least one of 
which, he said, had been dictated to him. He 
called it Jerusalem, and declared it was the grandest 
poem that this world contains. "I may praise it," 
he added, " since I dare not pretend to be any other 
than the secretary — the authors are in eternity." 
Within the next year or two he made a series of 
designs, in water-colors, for Blair's Grave, a gloomy 



WILLIAM BLAKE 179 

poem which still enjoyed some reputation. He 
intended to engrave and publish them, and would 
have done so if he had not fallen into the clutches 
of a Yorkshireman named Cromek, who had aban- 
doned engraving, and become a dealer in prints. 
This fellow, who was a scamp, met Blake when he 
and his wife were living on half a guinea a week, 
saw these designs in his room, and purchased the 
series of twelve for twenty-one pounds. It was 
understood — at any rate Blake understood — that he 
was to engrave the designs ; and he was proceed- 
ing to do so when Master Cromek engaged another 
engraver, thereby depriving Blake of any further 
gain from his work, which was published in 1808 
and was very profitable. Nor was this the end of 
Cromek ; for he had the impudence to call after- 
ward on Blake, who had made a drawing of Chau- 
cer's Canterbury Pilgrims, for which he gave him a 
commission ; but, true to his knavish instincts, he 
threw him over, and engaged Stothard to make an 
oil picture on the same subject. When Blake dis- 
covered this fact it created a difficulty between him- 
self and Stothard, which was never healed. 

A prospectus at the end of Blair's Grave of Stot- 
hard's print, determined Blake to complete his own 
Canterbury Pilgrims in what he called " fresco," 
and to exhibit it with other of his pictures and 
water-colors in the house in which he was born, and 



180 WILLIAM BLAKE 

which was still occupied by his brother the hosier. 
He drew up a Descriptive Catalogue of his works, 
which is said to be an excellent example of his 
prose. The price of admission to this exhibition 
was half a crown, which included the Catalogue ; 
but not many half-crowns were taken in, for Blake's 
art did not hit the popular taste. Nor did the print 
of the Canterbury Pilgrims which was published in 
the autumn of 1810, at the cost of four guineas 
to subscribers, who were few indeed. Lamb was 
greatly struck by this print, which he declared was 
the best criticism he had ever seen of Chaucer's 
poem. 

Given the singular temperament of Blake, his ec- 
centric habit of thought, and his wayward line of 
conduct, it required no great sagacity to divine from 
the beginning the end of his career, which could by 
no possibility be a prosperous one. Unsuccessful 
with the public, who knew little and cared less for 
his art, and unsuccessful with publishers, who pre- 
ferred the work of more popular engravers than he, 
he lived by two or three patrons, who greatly ad- 
mired him, one being Mr. John Linn ell, a landscape 
painter, another, Mr. John Varley, a painter in 
water-colors. It was for Varley that he drew his 
views of Visionary Heads, The Man who Built the 
Pyramids, Edward the Third, and The Ghost of a 
Flea ; and it was Linnell who purchased for a good 



WILLIAM BLAKE 181 

sum his water-color drawings for the Book of Job, 
which were published in 1826, and were the finest 
of all modern contributions to ancient Scriptural 
art, simple in conception, severe in execution, noble 
and dignified, majestic and magnificent. A perfect 
set of these wonderful designs is a priceless posses- 
sion. 

The end came to Blake on August 12, 1827. He 
composed and uttered Songs to his Maker, and 
they were so sweet in the ear of his wife, who stood 
by to hear them, that he said to her with a loving 
smile : " No, beloved, they are not mine ! no, they 
are not mine ! " He assured her that they would not 
be parted, and that he should always be about her 
to take care of her. He was going to that country 
he had all his life wished to see. " Just before he 
died, his countenance became fair, his eyes bright- 
ened, and he burst out into singing of the things he 
saw in Heaven." His breath began to fail, and to- 
ward six in the evening he passed away, so calmly 
and silently that the moment of his departure was 
not known. So lived, and so, in his seventieth year, 
died William Blake, of whom I will only say, in the 
words of Crabbe Kobinson, " Shall I call Blake 
artist, genius, mystic, or madman ? Probably he is 
all." 



HARTLEY COLERIDGE 

Whether the virtues and vices of men are the 
growth of their own personality, or whether they 
are inherited from their parentage, is a question 
which may well make the student of character pause 
before he attempts to decide it. To consider hered- 
ity is not to consider too curiously as regards the 
poetic character, which, strong in great poets like 
Shakespeare and Milton, is weak in singers like 
Edgar Allan Poe and Hartley Coleridge. Familiar 
from childhood with the verse and the life of the 
elder Coleridge, I have just been reading the life 
and the verse of his son, with whom great gifts were 
uselessly lodged, and who, beyond the son of any 
English poet that I recall, was the inheritor of un- 
fulfilled renown. 

The son of a country clergyman, vicar, and head 
master of a Free Grammar School at Ottery St. 
Mary, his father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, left an 
orphan at the age of nine, received before he was 
ten a presentation to Christ's Hospital, where he 
proceeded to bewilder himself in metaphysics and 



HARTLEY COLERIDGE 183 

controversial theology, occasionally dropping into 
poetry, which was savagely criticised by his master. 
At nineteen he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, 
where he soon won the Browne Gold Medal for a 
Greek ode on the Slave Trade, where he read Burke 
and studied the politics of the period, and whence, 
at twenty-one, either because he was in love or in 
debt (perhaps in both), he decamped, and went up 
to London, where, after a few days, he enlisted in 
the Fifteenth Light Dragoons as Silas Titus Comber- 
back — a freak which was imitated about thirty years 
later by Poe, who, in like manner, remembered to 
preserve the initials of his own name in the name 
under which he enlisted. An execrable rider and a 
negligent groom of his horse, Samuel Taylor re- 
mained in the awkward squad until he chanced to 
attract the attention of his captain by a quotation 
from Boethius, which he had scrawled on the wall of 
his stable at Beading, and which led to his discharge 
and return to Cambridge. A few months after this 
we find him at Bristol, in the society of two poets of 
about his own age — Robert Lovell, and Robert 
Southey — and three young damsels named Fricker, 
one of whom, Mary, either was, or was about to be, 
married to Lovell, another, Edith, being engaged 
to Southey, the third, Sarah, remaining in maiden 
meditation fancy free. Before long the fancy of 
this young man, which turned to so many things, 



184 A HARTLEY COLERIDGE 

turned to thoughts of love, and he became engaged 
to the fair Sarah. He said at a later period that 
the engagement was not his own deliberate act, but 
that it was in a manner forced upon him by the 
scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had gone 
too far in his attentions for airy honorable retreat ; 
others who saw him at the time declared that if 
there ever was a man in love, he was that man. 
But however this may have been, he was engaged, 
and returned to college, where he was in disfavor 
with the authorities on account of the visionary 
nature of his ideas, and soon left it for the second 
time, devoting his days to poetry, in conjunction 
with Southey, and his nights to smoking, in con- 
junction with Lamb, at the "Cat and Salutation." 
From London back to Bristol, where, with the help 
of Southey, he projected the notion of founding a 
Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, 
and where he lectured on History, Keligion, and the 
Hair Tax Powder. He lived from hand to mouth, 
the hand that supplied the mouth being for the 
most part that of Southey. 

Seventeen days before completing his twenty- 
third year, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, logician, meta- 
physician, bard, was married at St. Mary Bedcliffe 
church, Bristol, to Sarah Fricker. The happy pair 
began their honeymoon at Clevedon, on the banks 
of the Severn, where a cottage was hired, the rent 



HAETLEY COLEKIDGE 185 

of which was five pounds a year — a small, low, one- 
story building. It was, of course, unfurnished ; so 
two days after his marriage Coleridge wrote to 
Joseph Cottle, and asked him to send him at once 
such housekeeping necessaries as a riddle slice, a 
candle box, a tin dustpan and tin teakettle, a pair 
of candlesticks, a carpet brush, a pair of slippers, a 
cheese-toaster, a keg of porter, coffee, raisins, cur- 
rants, catsup, nutmegs, allspice, cinnamon, rice, 
ginger, mace, and — a Bible ! They were despatched 
thither, and were followed by Cottle, who, on his 
return to town, sent an upholsterer to paper the 
parlor, the walls whereof were merely whitewashed, 
A poet himself, and a publisher in a small way, 
Cottle had offered our bard thirty guineas for a 
volume of verse, which was then in the press ; and 
that finished, a guinea and a half for every hundred 
lines that he might produce. 

Upon this problematic provision, and with a child- 
like trust in Providence, the Coleridges began their 
wedded life. It was a happy one, if we may trust a 
poem on the music of an iEolian Harp which it in- 
spired. Bat, unhappily for poets, there comes a 
time in their lives when something besides the 
music of iEolian harps is necessary to keep the wolf 
from their cottage doors. So Coleridge projected a 
periodical, The Watchman, and set out on a tour to 
Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Derby, and Not- 



186 HAETLEY COLERIDGE 

tingliam to procure subscribers for it, preaching 
Unitarian sermons by the way in a blue coat and 
white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of 
Babylon might be seen upon him. Like Panti- 
socracy, The Watchman was intended to propagate 
whatever was calculated to improve the mental and 
moral condition of mankind, including, of course, 
the material condition of the editor. It was to con- 
sist of thirty-two pages, and to be published every 
eighth day, for fourpence — a sum which then and 
there, as was remarked by a Calvinistic tallow- 
chandler who was solicited to subscribe, meant " a 
deal of money at the end of the year." This search 
for subscriptions was no more remunerative than 
Micawber's coals, but all the same The Watchman 
appeared. Precisely what duty this guardian of the 
night was supposed to perform, no one could quite 
make out ; but whatever it was, it was resented 
from the start, for the second number, which con- 
tained an essay against fast-days, cost the editor 
nearly five hundred subscribers at one blow. That 
he was devoid of humor was apparent from the Bib- 
lical motto to this essay : " Wherefore my bowels 
shall sound like an harp." He wandered up and 
down, making enemies every time he sprang his 
rattle, until he reached the tenth number, when he 
concluded to discharge himself and retire to his box, 
where, about four months later, there was another 



HAETLEY COLEEIDGE 187 

mouth to feed. It was the mouth of little Hart- 
ley, who was born on September 19, 1796. His 
father was at Birmingham at the time ; but when 
the news reached him he started at once for Cleve- 
don, composing on the way a sonnet, in which he 
tried to imagine what he would feel if some one 
should meet him at his door, and tell him the child 
was dead. His foreboding was not realized, how- 
ever ; so he wrote another sonnet, in which he told 
the person to whom it was addressed— and who is 
supposed to have been Lamb — what he really felt 
when the nurse first presented the infant to him. 

Spells of genius were woven around the infancy 
and childhood of Hartley Coleridge. An eight 
months' child, and diminutive in stature, he was 
idolized by his father and his father's friends, who 
were captivated by his strange loveliness and his 
singular habits of introspection. That he was a re- 
markable child, and would have been so considered 
even if he had not been a poet's son, is evident from 
all that has been written about him, as well as the 
portrait which Wilkie painted at the age of ten, and 
which is as simply and sweetly human as the head 
of an ideal boy. We have a picturesque glimpse of 
him in the The Nightingale, a charming idyl, which 
was written at Nether Stowey, in the spring of 
1798, and have also another in Frost at Midnight, 
which was written some two months earlier, and con- 



188 HAKTLEY COLEKIDGE 

tains a paternal prophecy concerning his future life. 
The poet depicts himself as sitting in his cottage, with 
the babe sleeping in the cradle beside him, and as 
musing over his school-days, which were not happy. 

My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart 

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, 

And think that thou shall learn far other lore, 

And in far other scenes ! For I was reared 

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, 

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. 

But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze 

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 

Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds, 

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 

And mountain crags ; so shalt thou see and hear 

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 

Of that eternal language, which thy God 

Utters, who from eternity doth teach 

Himself in all, and all things in Himself, 

Great universal Teacher ! He shall mould 

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 

Whether the summer clothe the general earth 

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch 

Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eve -drops fall, 

Heard only in the trances of the blast, 

Or in the secret ministry of frost 

Shall hang them up in quiet icicles, 

Quietly smiling to the quiet moon. 



HARTLEY COLERIDGE 189 

To what extent Coleridge's interest in his son was 
a poetic one, and to what extent a paternal one, we 
have to conjecture from what is related respecting 
his contradictions of character and his eccentricities 
of conduct. He seems to have had no recognition 
of duty as it is understood by the majority of man- 
kind, or to have been incapable of performing it the 
moment he recognized it as duty. Unfitted for do- 
mestic ties, he was seldom at home when he could 
be anywhere else, and when at home he was not 
above being supported by others. The story of his 
life is the story of his changes of residence — from 
town to town, from England to Germany, from Lon- 
don to Keswick, thence to Malta and back to Lon- 
don, where, with visits to Keswick and Grasmere, 
he took up his final abode with the Gillmans, dying 
at Highgate in his sixty-second year. It is, further- 
more, the story of his many employments — in jour- 
nalism, in lecturing, in planning books that were 
never written, in endless talk, and in the constant 
consumption of opium. 

When Hartley was about four years old he was 
taken by his father and mother to Keswick, where 
a house was then being built by a Mr. Jackson on 
the bank of the Greta, into which house, when 
completed, or rather into half of it, moved the 
three Coleridges, who were soon joined by a 
fourth, Derwent, who grew up to be the play- 



190 HAETLEY COLERIDGE 

mate of Hartley, the story of whose life he lived 
to write. 

The strange impression which Hartley made upon 
the friends of his father, and the apprehensions to 
which that impression gave rise, were embodied by 
one of these friends in a copy of verses (To H. C, 
Six Years Old), to which the only worthy compan- 
ion piece that I can recall is Emerson's Threnody. 
A great poet, Wordsworth, for once was a prophet : 

blessed Vision ! happy Child ! 
Thou art so exquisitely wild, 

1 think of thee with many fears 

For what may be thy lot in future years. 

I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest, 

Lord of thy house and hospitality ; 

And Grief, uneasy lover ! never rest 

But when she sat within the touch of thee. 

O too industrious folly, 

O vain and causeless melancholy, 

Nature will either end thee quite, 

Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, 

Preserve for thee, by individual right, 

A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks. 

The childhood of Hartley Coleridge was not 
marked by the love of reading which has character- 
ized so many clever children, but by a curious 
introversion of mind, and a strange inability to 
distinguish between fact and fiction. Involved in 



HARTLEY COLERIDGE 191 

himself and compact of imaginations, he lived in a 
dream. What some of his young dreams were we 
gather from Crabbe Kobinson, who, describing in 
his Diary a visit made by him to Lamb, in the sum- 
mer of 1811 (Hartley's fifteenth year), mentions that 
Coleridge was present, and that there was a short 
but interesting conversation on German metaphys- 
ics : " C. related some curious anecdotes of his son 
Hartley, whom he represented to be a most remark- 
able child, a deep thinker in his infancy. He tor- 
mented himself in his attempts to solve the prob- 
lems that would equally torment the full-grown 
man, if the world and its cares and pleasures did 
not distract his attention. Hartley, when about five 
years old, was asked a question about himself being- 
called Hartley. ' Which Hartley ? ' asked the boy. 
' Why ! is there more than one Hartley ? ' ' Yes,' 
he replied, ' there's a deal of Hartleys.' ' How so ? ' 
1 There's Picture Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a 
portrait of him), and Shadow Hartley, and there's 
Echo Hartley, and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley ; ' 
at the same time seizing his own arm with the other 
hand very eagerly — an action which shows that his 
mind must have been drawn to reflect on what 
Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery, viz., 
that man should be both his own subject and ob- 
ject, and that these two should be one." 

If Coleridge had thought less of the subjective 



192 HAETLEY COLEKIDGE 

and the objective about which he was prosing all 
his life, and more of his wife and children, the 
eldest of these children might, perhaps, have been 
preserved from the weakness which wrecked his 
life. His father may have been as proud of him as 
he professed to be, but the pride which not only 
permitted him to neglect the lad while his character 
was in the process of formation, but left his physi- 
cal maintenance, as well as that of his mother and 
his brother and sister, to others, chiefly to Southey, 
is so closely allied to degradation that I for one can 
neither condone it, nor understand it. 

Practically a pensioner on the bounty of his re- 
lations, and the generosity of his father's admirers, 
Hartley Coleridge was sent to Oxford in his eigh- 
teenth or nineteenth year, as a scholar of Merton 
College. The charm which he had exercised in 
boyhood over all with whom he came in contact was 
felt and acknowledged here, and by no one more 
than his fellow- student Alexander Dyce, who was 
one day to take rank among the best of Shake- 
speare's scholars. Here is what Dyce wrote to his 
brother Derwent after his death: "His extraordi- 
nary powers as a converser (or rather a declaimer) 
procured for him numerous invitations to what are 
called at Oxford ' wine parties.' He knew that he 
was expected to talk, and talking was his delight. 
Leaning his head on one shoulder, turning up his 



HAETLEY COLEKIDGE 193 

dark, bright eyes, and swinging backward and for- 
ward in his chair, he would hold forth by the hour 
(for no one wished to interrupt him) on whatever 
subject might have been started — either of litera- 
ture, politics, or religion — with an originality of 
thought, a force of illustration, and a facility and 
beauty of expression, which I question if any man 
then living, except his father, could have surpassed." 

Hartley spent his long vacations at Greta Hall, 
Keswick, the home of his uncle, Southey, where, in 
the summer of 1810, he made the acquaintance of 
Chauncey Hare Townsend, who thus described his 
personal appearance : 

"It was the custom of Hartley at that time to 
study the whole clay, and only toward the dusk 
of the evening to come forth for needful exercise 
and recreation. My attention was at first aroused 
by seeing from my window a figure flitting about 
amongst the trees and shrubs of the garden with 
quick and agitated motion. This was Hartley, who, 
in the ardor of preparing for his college examina- 
tions, did not even take his meals with the family, 
but snatched a hasty morsel in his own apartment, 
and only, as I have said, sought the free air when 
the fading* daylight no longer permitted him to see 
his books. Having found out who he was that so 
mysteriously flitted about the garden, I was deter- 
mined to lose no time in making his acquaint- 
13 



194 HAETLEY COLERIDGE 

ance, and through the instrumentality of Mrs. Cole- 
ridge, I paid Hartley a visit to what he called his 
den. This was a room afterwards converted by 
Mr. Southey into a supplementary library, but then 
appropriated as a study to Hartley, and presenting 
a most picturesque and student - like disorder of 
scattered pamphlets and open folios. Here I was 
received by Hartley with much urbanity and friend- 
liness, and from that time we were a good deal to- 
gether." Mr. Townsend was impressed by the elo- 
quence of Hartley's talk, which skimmed over the 
fields of literature, explored the region of metaphys- 
ics, and frequently embraced religion, of which the 
young collegian appeared to have a profound knowl- 
edge. He was of an absent turn of mind — a Co- 
leridgian peculiarity of which Mr. Townsend re- 
membered a curious instance. " Hartley generally 
joined the family at tea, which was served in Mr. 
Southey's study, or library, a large room whose walls 
were books, whose ornaments were works of art 
and objects of science — an apartment in which all 
requisites for bodily and mental comfort were more 
united than in any apartment I ever saw. As it 
was known that Hartley at that period was wholly 
occupied with his studies, and that these were pur- 
sued up to the last available moment of the day, he 
was by common consent absolved from what Gait 
would have called the prejudices of the toilet, and 



HAETLEY COLERIDGE 195 

so it was his wont to stray into the room where 
the family were assembled, attired in his reading- 
costume, namely, a sort of loose toga, between a 
coat and a dressing-gown, and his feet in slippers. 
Sometimes he did not appear in the library at all ; 
but with that perfect liberty which made happy the 
inmates of Mr. Southey's house, he would stay away, 
or come, just as it suited his fancy or his studies. 
On one occasion it so happened that, after a day or 
two's seclusion, Hartley came into the library in the 
very identical reading costume I have described, on 
an evening when, added to the usual frequenters 
of our tea-table, were a party of strangers (a cir- 
cumstance of which Hartley was wholly unaware), 
some of them ladies from the South, such as were 
wont occasionally, during the summer, to seek Mr. 
Southey's residence with any pretext or introduc- 
tion which might further their desire to see the 
great poet, and partake his known hospitality. 
When I saw Hartley open the door, and walk in 
with his usual abstracted look, I felt awkward for 
him, but I might have spared myself that feeling ; 
Hartley did not seem to think that the addition to 
our party was a legitimate cause of embarrassment, 
or rather, he did not, I believe, employ any thought 
on the subject at all. For exactly as if not a single 
person had been present besides those whom he 
was accustomed to behold, he quietly walked up to 



196 HAETLEY COLERIDGE 

the first seat that presented itself, which happened 
to be an ottoman, where one or two ladies sat, and 
placed himself by their side with a preparatory bow, 
as if he was doing (which in fact he was) a perfectly 
natural thing. Whatever the ladies might at first 
have thought of this rather unusual apparition, I 
am quite sure that, in a very few minutes, every 
other feeling of theirs was completely merged in 
unfeigned delight at the conversation into which 
Hartley entered with them, with an easy good breed- 
ing which he possessed in a remarkable degree, and 
which, united as it was with uncommon power of 
mind, his fair auditors might perhaps have looked 
for in vain from one who had approached them 
dressed point device, and encased in the whole 
buckram of ceremony." 

Hartley returned to Oxford, passed his examina- 
tion successfully, and stood for a fellowship at Oriel. 
He obtained the fellowship with high distinction, 
but did not hold it long, for at the close of his pro- 
bationary year he was judged to have forfeited it, on 
the ground mainly of intemperance. 

The blow was a terrible one to Coleridge, not so 
much on account of its material consequences, as on 
account of the moral offence it involved. So, at 
least, he declared to his son Derwent, who probably 
accepted the justice of his father's verdict, which 
came with a very bad grace (I cannot help thinking) 



HAETLEY COLERIDGE 197 

from one who had long been in the habit of taking 
from two quarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, 
and who had been known to take a whole quart in 
the twenty-four hours. But if Coleridge was not 
moral, he was nothing. Waiving, however, the 
moral offense, which was speedily punished, the 
material consequences were deplorable, in that poor 
Hartley was never able to overcome them. He went 
to London, where he remained about two years, and 
where, of course, he failed to live by his pen, as 
many literary adventurers had done before him, 
and many have done since. "The cause of his fail- 
ure lay in himself," his brother assures us, " not in 
any want of literary power, of which he had always 
a ready command, and which he could have made 
to assume the most popular forms, but he had lost 
the power of will. His steadiness of purpose was 
gone, and the motives which he had for exertion, 
imperative as they appeared, were without force. 
Necessity acted upon him with the touch of a tor- 
pedo. He needed a more genial stimulus. Dreamy 
as he had always been, he had not hitherto neglect- 
ed the call of duty. He had shown no want of en- 
ergy or perseverance either at school or college. 
Now he gave way to a habit of procrastination, from 
which, except for short intervals and under favor- 
able circumstances, he did not recover until it was 
too late. Thus leaving undone what he wished, and 



198 HAETLEY COLERIDGE 

continually intended to do, he shrank from the bit- 
terness of his reflections, which, notwithstanding, 
continually returned upon him and took the place of 
action ; and though he never deliberately sought re- 
lief in wine, yet he was a welcome guest in all socie- 
ties, and when surprised by consequences against 
which he was not sufficiently on his guard, he shrank 
from the reproaches, and yet more from the uncom- 
plaining forgiveness of his friends. This led to a 
habit of wandering and concealment, which returned 
upon him at uncertain intervals during the middle 
portion of his life, exposing him to many hardships, 
if not dangers, and his friends to sore anxiety." 

Quitting London at last, Hartley returned to Am- 
bleside, where he received pupils, for which he was 
not fitted, since he could not maintain the neces- 
sary discipline ; thence he removed to Grasmere, 
where he lodged at a little rustic inn, and, later, at 
Nab Cottage, on the banks of the Rydal, where, 
known throughout the country for his gentle ways, 
and loved by all, particularly children, he wan- 
dered from year to year down his darkened vale of 
life, until January 6, 1849, when his perturbed 
spirit found rest. "Let him lie by us," said Words- 
worth, "he would have wished it." It was done; 
and to-day, in the little graveyard at Grasmere, 
among the dust of the Wordsworths, one sees the 
name of Hartley Coleridge. 



HAETLEY COLEEIDGE 199 

The son of a poet, and the son, by adoption, of 
two other poets, Hartley Coleridge might have 
proved his relationship to the Triumvirate of the 
Lakes more surely than he did if his career had not 
prematurely been blasted. His verse is not much 
read now, I fancy, but it ought to be, for it is better 
than the strong lines which are the fashion in this 
critical age. I think so, at any rate, and I hope the 
reader of this sonnet of his will agree with me : 

Long time a child, and still a child, when years 

Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I — 

For yet I lived like one not born to die ; 

A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears, 

No hope I needed, and I knew no fears, 

But sleep, though sweet ! is only sleep, and waking, 

I waked to sleep no more, at once o'ertaking 

The vanguard of my age, with all arrears 

Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man, 

Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is gray, 

For I have lost the race I never ran ; 

A rathe December blights my lagging May ; 

And still I am a child, though I be old, 

Time is my debtor for my years untold. 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 

No nineteenth century English poet with whom I 
am acquainted, ever promised more and performed 
less than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose verse, like 
his life, was a wayward fragment. He enjoyed the 
honor of a remarkable, and, in a certain sense, dis- 
tinguished, parentage, his mother being a younger 
sister of Maria Edgeworth, and his father, Thomas 
Beddoes, what would now be called a scientist, 
since to knowledge in medicine, which was his pro- 
fession, he added knowledge in chemistry, and was 
the projector and founder of a Pneumatic Institu- 
tion for the treatment of disease by inhalation, for 
which Watt constructed an apparatus, and where- 
in a young man named Davy, who was afterward 
knighted, was his assistant. Dr. Beddoes wrote a 
treatise on the calculus, a number of political pam- 
phlets in which he violently assailed Pitt, several 
medical works, and was the author of a poem on 
the conquests of Alexander, one object of which was 
to denounce the aggrandizements of his country- 
men in India, another to show the possibility of 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 201 

imitating, if not excelling, that preposterous piece 
of glittering fustian — Darwin's Botanic Garden. 
Like many thoughtful men in the last decade of 
the last century, he sympathized warmly with the 
French Ke volution, and, like all philosophic enthu- 
siasts, he hated every form of oppression. Inquisi- 
tive and energetic, original and independent, a seek- 
er after, and a worshipper of, truth, he died in his 
forty-ninth year, and was mourned by Southey, who 
wrote, on hearing of his death : " From Beddoes 
I hoped for more good to the human race than 
any other individual ; " and, also, by Coleridge, who 
wrote on the same occasion : " I felt that more had 
been taken out of my life by this than by any 
former event." 

Born in Kodney Place, in the summer of 1803, 
and left an orphan in his sixth year, young Bed- 
does was placed under the guardianship of Mr. 
Davies Giddy, an old college friend of his father, 
by whom he was sent to the Bath Grammar School, 
and removed thence, in his fourteenth year, to the 
Charterhouse school, where he was considered a 
very clever boy, though not fond of society and the 
usual games of schoolboys. One of his achieve- 
ments while at the Charterhouse was the taking of 
a prize for a Latin theme, another was the volumi- 
nous study of the old dramatists, an uncommon 
course of reading for a lad in the period of Scott 



202 THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 

and Byron, and one which betrayed an independ- 
ence if not a singularity of taste. It developed, if 
it did not create, his determination to be a poet, 
which was formed at an early day, his first compo- 
sition dating in his fifteenth year. He saw himself 
in print in the Morning Post in the following year, 
and by the time he was eighteen he had written 
verse enough to fill a volume, which he called The 
Improvisatore, and of which he was afterward so 
ashamed that he destroyed every copy upon which 
he could lay hands. Like all first volumes of verse, 
it reflected the manner of the poets whom he 
sought to emulate, who were not the Elizabethan 
dramatists, as one might suppose from his reading, 
but the sentimental imitators of Scott and Byron — 
feeble specimens of metrical romances, of which 
there were three in his little book, such constituting 
a "fytte," and each having an " induction." I have 
never mustered up courage enough to read The Im- 
provisatore, but I have read enough of it to see that 
it is written in pure and beautiful English — a liter- 
ary quality by which the earliest writing of Beddoes 
was distinguished as surely as the earliest writing 
of Keats. 

About a year before the publication of this volume 
Beddoes was entered a commoner at Pembroke Col- 
lege, Oxford, in which his father and his guardian 
had been educated, and which, from the number of 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 203 

poets whom it had sheltered, Dr. Johnson described 
as a nest of singing birds. It was while residing 
here, where he made no effort to distinguish him- 
self, that Beddoes turned his studies of the old 
dramatists to account in The Bride's Tragedy, the 
leading idea of which was based upon an event that 
had occurred at Oxford. The reign of the poetic 
drama was more bustling at the time than it has 
been since, and among all those who sought to illus- 
trate it successfully — Byron, Coleridge, Croly, Mil- 
man, Procter — there was no one in whom the dra- 
matic instinct was so strong as this young com- 
moner of Pembroke. The Bride's Tragedy, which 
appeared in his nineteenth year, was welcomed by 
the best critics, two of whom, both poets, praised it 
heartily — Barry Cornwall in the Edinburgh Review 
and George Darley in the London Magazine. Darley 
wrote, over the pen-name of John Lacy, a series of 
Letters to the Dramatists of the Day, in one of 
which he expressed his admiration of this perform- 
ance of Beddoes, whom he complimented at the ex- 
pense of his elders— notably Byron and Barry Corn- 
wall, to whom he was teaching their once poetical 
mother tongue, the very elements of their native 
poetical dialect, which they had either forgotten, or 
corrupted with a base intermixture of foreign prin- 
ciples. He wrote : " However, here is Minor Bed- 
does, born in the very zenith of this mock sun of 



204 THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 

poetiw, while it is culminating in the mid-heaven of 
our literary hemisphere, shining in watery splendor, 
the gaze and gape of our foolish-faced, fat-headed 
nation ; here is Minor Beddoes, I say, born amid 
the very rage and triumph of the Byronian heresy — 
nay, in a preface more remarkable for good nature 
than good sense, eulogizing some of the prose-poets 
— yet what does Minor Beddoes ? Why, writing a 
tragedy himself, with a judgment far different from 
that exhibited in his own panegyrical preface, he 
totally rejects, and therewith tacitly condemns and 
abjures, the use of prose-poetry. But it was not the 
boy's judgment that led him to this ; it was his un- 
depraved ear, and his native energy of mind, teach- 
ing him to respite this effeminate style of versifica- 
tion. The Bride's Tragedy transcends, in the 
quality of its rhythm and metrical harmony, The 
Doge of Venice, and Mirandola, just as much as it 
does Fazio, and the other dramas which conform 
to the rules of genuine English heroic verse in the 
energy of its language, the power of its sentiments, 
and the boldness of its imagery — that is incalcu- 
lably." 

The first literary friend that Beddoes seems to 
have made was Procter, who introduced him to 
Thomas Forbes Kelsall, whose name, unknown as it 
is, I bracket here with Procter's, for the reason that 
the pair stood in closer personal relations with him 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 205 

than any of his acquaintances, and corresponded with 
him for years. The interest which attaches to him 
at this period is not derived from his life, which was 
rather an aimless one, but from his sallies into the 
paths of criticism, and his excursions into the fields 
of song. There is a life, a spirit, an originality in 
his letters which is not a common inheritance 
among the guild of poets, charming as are the letters 
of Gray and Cowper, and enjoyable as are the riot- 
ous letters of Byron. They are as surely the let- 
ters of a man of genius as those of Lamb, or Keats, 
or Edward Fitzgerald, and should be read with the 
largest indulgence for their aggressive individuality 
and indomitable independence. They show the ac- 
tivity of his mind, which was ripening fast, and its 
abundant fertility, for they refer to poetic works up- 
on which he was engaged, Love's Arrow Poisoned, 
The Last Man, Torrismoncl, The Second Brother — 
hasty dramatic studies which, promising to be 
powerful tragedies, were abandoned almost as soon 
as begun, and never completed. " His poetic com- 
position was then exceedingly facile," we are told 
by his friend Kelsall ; "more than once or twice he 
has taken home with him at night some unfinished 
act of a drama, in which the editor had found much 
to admire, and at the next meeting has produced a 
new one, similar in design, but filled with other 
thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination 



206 THOMAS LOYELL BEDDOES 

had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from 
any feeling, right or fastidious, of unworthiness in 
its predecessor." 

One needs to be a profound student of the motives 
which actuate men like Beddoes before he can begin 
to understand their impulses and eccentricities. A 
law unto themselves, they are a puzzle to their fel- 
lows. There mingled in Beddoes strains of the Irish 
blood of his mother and the Welsh blood of his 
father, and it may have been the predominance of 
the last which impelled him to abandon literature 
and study medicine. What might have been a whim 
at first was soon a determination, for rushing off to 
Germany at twenty-two he practically expatriated 
himself during the rest of his life, studying at Got- 
tingen under Professor Blumenbach, who said he 
was the best scholar he ever had. If he had been 
content to devote his days to medicine one might 
feel, perhaps, that it was from a passion for the 
scientific advancement of the healing art, or from a 
sense of duty toward the sick and suffering, and con- 
done the way of life that robbed the world of a great 
poet ; but when to the study of medicine, which he 
can hardly be said to have practised, he added an 
active and dangerous participation in Continental 
politics, one cannot but conclude that he was either 
a. madman, or a fool. He seems to have inherited 
politics from his father as well as physic. At last he 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 207 

was obliged to fly from Bavaria and take refuge in 
Switzerland, where he rowed along the lakes, and 
walked over the Alps, writing a little English and a 
great deal of German. He made several flying visits 
to England, on the last of which he intended to re- 
main only six weeks, but remained ten months, six 
of which he spent in a bedroom, reading and smok- 
ing, and seeing no one. He had changed so greatly 
in his personal appearance as to be scarcely recog- 
nizable by the friends of his youth, was misanthropic 
and cynical, rough in his speech, and eccentric in 
his manners, or want of manners. He visited his 
friend Kelsall, and the Procters, who found him, as 
Mrs. Procter afterward confessed to Mr. Edmund 
Gosse, a rather uncomfortable companion. "She 
told me that his eccentricities were so marked that 
they almost gave the impression of insanity, but that 
close observation showed them to be merely the re- 
sult of a peculiar fancy, entirely unaccustomed to 
restraint, and the occasional rebound of spirits after 
a period of depression. The Procters found Bed- 
does a most illusive companion. He would come to 
them uninvited, but never if he had been asked, or 
if he feared to meet a stranger. On one occasion, 
Mrs. Procter told me, they had asked Beddoes to 
dine with them, and proceed afterward to Drury 
Lane Theatre. He did not come, and they dined 
alone. On approaching the theatre they saw Bed- 



208 THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 

does in charge of the police, and on inquiry found 
that he had just been arrested for trying to put 
Drury Lane on fire. The incendiary, however, had 
used no more dangerous torch than a five-pound 
note, and Mr. Procter had little difficulty in persuad- 
ing the police that this was much more likely to 
hurt the pocket of Mr. Beddoes than the rafters of 
the theatre." 

From this visit Beddoes returned to Frankfort, 
where he lodged with a young baker, and where his 
blood was poisoned from the virus of a dead body 
that he was dissecting. For six months he remained 
with his baker, whom he taught to speak English, 
and whom he persuaded to accompany him on a 
journey through Germany and Switzerland. At 
Zurich he hired a theatre for one night, that the 
man of bread might enact the part of Hotspur. 
When they separated at Basel, Beddoes took a room 
at a hotel, where, on the next morning after his ar- 
rival, he inflicted a wound on his right leg with a 
razor. Kemoved to the Town Hospital, he was 
waited upon by two of his medical friends, under 
whose care he might have recovered if he had not 
stealthily torn off the bandages of his wound. Gan- 
grene set in, and the leg was amputated below 
the knee-joint. As he improved in health he began 
to read the books which covered his bed, to write, 
nnd talk of literature. Before long he was able to 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 209 

walk out of his room, and the first time he went 
into the town he procured, on his own author- 
ity as a medical man, the deadly poison known 
as curare. In the evening one of his physicians 
was summoned to his bedside. He was lying on 
his back insensible, with a note in pencil pinned 
on his bosom. It was addressed to one of the 
oldest of his English friends, and began, curtly : "I 
am food for what I am good for — worms." He 
died that night, and was buried under a cypress 
in the hospital cemetery. Such was the life, and 
such the death, in his forty-sixth year, of Thomas 
Lovell Beddoes. 

Just before the completion of his twenty-second 
year, and on the eve of his departure for Germany, 
Beddoes wrote to his friend Kelsall, that he was 
thinking of a very Gothic tragedy, for which he had 
a jewel of a name — Death's Jestbook — and which, 
of course, no one would ever read. Precisely when 
he began it does not appear ; but less than six 
months after this he informed the same friend that 
it was going on like a tortoise — slow and sure ; that 
he thought it would be very entertaining, but very 
unamiable, and very unpopular ; and that it might 
be finished by the following spring or autumn. By 
the time spring came he had written the first four 
acts and half of the fifth, and by autumn it was 
done and done for, its limbs being as scattered and 
14 



210 THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 

unconnected as those of the old gentleman whom 
Medea minced and boiled young. Two years later 
he visited England for a few days and brought 
the manuscript ; but Kelsall and Procter were 
averse from its publication until he should revise 
and correct it. Year after year passed, and it 
was revised and corrected, but not to his satis- 
faction ; for he left no less than three different 
texts. These he bequeathed with the rest of his 
manuscripts to Kelsall, who, not long after his 
death, published Death's Jestbook, and reprinted 
it two years later with The Bride's Tragedy, and 
his miscellaneous verse. The collection made two 
charming volumes, of the kind to which Picker- 
ing had accustomed the amateurs of printing, by 
whom they were seized upon and placed among 
their treasures. 

There were the makings of a greater poet in Bed- 
does than he ever became, except at intervals, and 
in his most inspired moments ; and the poet that 
he might have been, if fully developed, is of a kind 
that English poetry has long since outgrown. He 
belonged to the same guild of dramatists as Mar- 
lowe, Tourneur, and Webster, but where they were 
masters, he was an apprentice. There were the 
same dark elements in his genius as in theirs, but 
they were more confused and tumultuous, more cha- 
otic than creative, and more horrible than terrible. 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 211 

Death's Jestbook is a nightmare rather than a 
drama, and should be judged, if one must judge it, 
for what it is, not for what it might be, or should 
be. A law unto himself, Bedcloes is the most law- 
less of poets. The scenes of his tragedies are laid 
in the land of Nowhere, and the actors therein, 
if not wholly mad, are certainly not sane. They 
live, move, and have their being in a borderland be- 
tween the worlds of life and death. The prey of 
spasmodic emotion and unnatural passion, there is 
no telling what they will say or do in their fits 
of delirium, which are as unaccountable as vio- 
lent. The specialty of the elder Beddoes was the 
analysis of disease ; the specialty of his son was the 
exhibition of disease in the actors of his gloomy 
masquerades. They are as unsubstantial as the 
Chorus in Lord Brook's tragedy of Alaham, which 
was the Ghost of one of the old kings of Ormuz. 
A reader of Beddoes for years, I have never till 
now attempted to define his qualities, and now 
that I have attempted it, I am sorry that I have 
done so ; for when a poet with his genius ap- 
pears, which is not often in a century, I am con- 
tent to let him be a chartered libertine, if he must. 
He had great, almost the greatest of gifts — an ac- 
tive and daring imagination, a profusion of imag- 
ery, and a vocabulary of singular purity, richness, 
and power. I copy one of his lyrics, which has 



212 THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 

the flavor, though not the melody, of the best of 
Shelley's. 

A Dirge. 

(Written for a Drama.) 

To-day is a thought, a fear is to-morrow, 
Arid yesterday is our sin and our sorrow; 

And life is a death, 

Where the hody's the tomb, 

And the pale, sweet breath 

Is buried alive in its hideous gloom. 

Then waste no tear, 

For we are the dead ; the living are here, 

In the stealing earth, and the heavy bier. 
Death lives but an instant, and is but a sigh, 
And his son is unnamed immortality, 
Whose being is thine. Dear Ghost, so to die 
Is to live — and life is a worthless lie — 
Then we weep for ourselves, and wish thee good-by. 

Was Beddoes mad ? Judging by his eccentric life, 
and the sickly cast of thought by which his verse 
was distinguished, I fear so. 



GEORGE DARLEY 

Old magazines, to which famous writers were con- 
tributors in their literary nonage, generally afford 
me a pleasure which I am not certain to derive from 
their biographies, in that reading them in the order 
in which they were published I see these writers 
through the eyes of their contemporaries, note the 
growth of their minds, and detect the laws which de- 
termine the extent of their powers. Every time I 
come upon the name of a writer whom I am tracing 
he is a different man to me ; last month he was 
merry, this month he is melancholy, and next month 
— but who can tell me what he will be then ? I follow 
my Proteus with surprise, possibly with disappoint- 
ment, but always with the satisfaction we feel in dis- 
covering things for ourselves. He is not necessarily 
a celebrity (about such, if they have been well edited, 
there is not much to be learned) ; and if he be not, 
so much the better, for the less there is known the 
more there is to be known. 

No old magazine with which I am acquainted 
ever started under better auspices than the London- 



214 GEOEGE DAELEY 

Magazine, or ever had, at least in its earlier volumes, 
a better corps of contributors. Foremost among 
them was Charles Lamb, who enriched its pages 
month after month with the immortal Essays of 
Elia ; Thomas de Quincey, who startled its readers 
with his experiences and fantasies as an Opium 
Eater ; Allan Cunningham, who had no end of ro- 
mantic Scotch legends to tell ; Thomas Hood, who 
was its sweetest, and loveliest, and most poetical 
poet ; John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant, 
and other good men and true, who, if not wholly 
forgotten, have missed renown. The first editor of 
the London Magazine was John Scott, an able, inde- 
pendent man, who thought well of Hunt and Keats, 
and very ill of Wilson, Lockhart, and the rest of 
Blackwood's blackguards, and whose fearless pug- 
nacity cost him his life (the duello was fashionable 
then) ; and his assistant, or "sub," was Hood, whose 
cunning hand inserted answers to rejected contribu- 
tors in the Lion's Mouth. 

It is instructive, in looking over these old maga- 
zines, to read what the gentlemen who were em- 
ployed upon them in a critical capacity had to say 
respecting the publications of the period. The first 
volume of the London Magazine contains reviews 
of the Endymion of Keats, The Cenci of Shelley, 
and Milman's Fall of Jerusalem ; the second volume 
reviews of Hunt's Hero and Leander, Barry Corn- 



GEORGE DAELEY 215 

wall's Marcian Colonna, and The Abbot of Scott ; 
and the third reviews of Kenilworth and Marino 
Faliero. Seventy years ago the reputations of 
Hunt, Keats, and Shelley were still to make, while 
the reputations of Scott and Byron, though as- 
suredly great, were not so certainly fame as now. 
But others besides authors were held up at the bar 
of criticism in the London Magazine, and among 
them were the prominent actors of the day — Elliston 
and Liston, Young and Macready, and Edmund 
Kean, who was then at the height of his popularity, 
and was, in the opinion of his doughty censor (who 
could not have been Hazlitt, for he was a Keanite), 
a very faulty, and, at times, a very bad actor. I 
have spent many pleasant hours over the London 
Magazine, in the society of Lamb and Hazlitt and 
De Quincey — glorious spirits, who were then in 
their prime — and many melancholy hours also ; for 
in letters, as in other earthly pursuits, many are 
called, but few are chosen. We cannot all be great, 
nor remembered, for whatever our aspirations and 
ambitions and talents, most of us poor penmen are 
speedily, and some of us deservedly, forgotten. Who 
reads Allan Cunningham to-day, or John Clare, or 
Bernard Barton, or dear George Darley ? 

A good many years ago, when I used to haunt old 
bookstores, where rarities were more plentiful than 
they are now, and might sometimes be purchased 



216 GEOEGE DAELEY 

cheaply, I came across a little book, in a marbled 
paper binding, with a back of black leather, where- 
on was stamped in tarnished gold letters, " G. Dar- 
ley," and under it the word " Sylvia." Opening it 
out of curiosity, I read the title-page : Silvia ; or 
The May Queen. A Lyrical Drama. By George 
Darley ; and, casting my eye at the foot of the 
page, I discovered that it bore the imprint of the 
publishers of Keats, John Taylor and J. A. Hessey, 
and that it was published in 1827. Turning the 
leaves, I saw that it was a book in verse, inter- 
spersed with prose, and so far it hit my taste ; but 
who was George Darley ? I had never heard of him. 
I bought the book, however, and read it with a 
delight that I do not now find in much modern 
verse. A year or two later I bought another book, 
at the same old store, from which I learned some- 
thing about George Darley. It was Recollections 
of a Literary Life, by Mary Russell Mitford. 

The plan which this estimable gentlewoman pur- 
sued while writing this agreeable volume was not 
one which demanded any research on her part, her 
object being simply to chat about some of her fa- 
vorite authors, to indicate the qualities in their 
writings which appealed most strongly to her taste, 
and to illustrate these qualities by a few choice ex- 
tracts. She knew Darley only through his corre- 
spondence, never having met him, and consequently 



GEOEGE DAELEY 217 

had but little to tell her readers about his personality 
and life, except that he was the son of an Irish al- 
derman, and that he stammered so as to render con- 
versation painful and difficult to himself, and dis- 
tressing to his companions. Sir Egerton Brydges, 
who wrote a series of Imaginary Biographies, could 
not have made much out of these shadowy outlines, 
to which I can add but little, though I have supple- 
mented them when I could. The son of Arthur 
Darley, George Darley, was born at Dublin, in 
1795 ; entered Trinity College in 1815, and took 
the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1820. What ca- 
reer Alderman Darley expected his stammering son 
to follow when he sent him to college we have to 
conjecture, but certainly it was not the one which 
he determined to follow, which was that of author- 
ship ; so he became estranged from his family, and, 
quitting Dublin, went to London, whither many a 
young Irishman had gone before him, and many 
more have gone after him. There, in 1822, he pub- 
lished his first book, The Errors of Ecstacie, which 
is described as a dialogue in melodious blank verse 
between a Mystic and the Moon, and a curious dia- 
logue it was, no doubt. How he continued to live 
in London, whether on an allowance from his prosaic 
parent, or by his pen, we have to conjecture, but 
most likely by the latter. 

He wrote largely in the London Magazine, to 



218 GEOKGE DAKLEY 

which, in March, 1823, he contributed Olympian 
Revels, a Dramatica, a medley in prose and verse, 
the intention of which was not so apparent as that 
of The Revelle, which appeared a month earlier, or 
that of The Chase, which appeared four months 
later, both of which I assume to be his. These fan- 
tastic trifles, which fairly indicated his intellectual 
quality, served as a prologue to a series of papers, 
which began in the latter month (July), with A Let- 
ter to the Dramatists of the Day, and was contin- 
ued month after month in five similar letters, over 
the signature of John Lacy, the series concluding 
with a double epilogue in the shape of a postscript, 
from an alleged dramatist, who defended himself 
and his fellows behind the shield of Terentius Se- 
cundius, and a Eeply to the same from the aggres- 
sive Mr. Lacy. If these letters were not eagerly 
read (though I believe they were), they should have 
been, firstly, because they were critical ; secondly, 
because they were scholarly ; and thirdly, because 
they were independent. That this writer had stud- 
ied the early masters of English dramatic literat- 
ure was as certain as that he had studied its latest 
pupils, to whose poverty of action and affluence of 
fiction he was keenly sensitive. But he wrote other 
things than those dramatic diatribes in the London 
Magazine ; for I find in the number for July, 1824, 
a story of his called Lilian of the Vale, a sort of 



GEOEGE DARLEY 219 

imaginative pastoral of the Florian order, which 
contained a little song, I've been Koaming, that soon 
attained a wide popularity. He tried his " 'prentice 
han' " at other stories, seven of which he collected 
into a volume, The Labours of Idleness, which was 
published in 1826, and was followed (as I have al- 
ready said), in. 1827, by Sylvia, which was founded 
on Lilian of the Vale. 

But other intellectual activities than are implied 
in the writing of stories, and poems, and criticisms, 
were dominant with Darley at this period ; for 
between 1826 and 1828 he wrote three scientific 
treatises, one on Geometry, another on Algebra, and 
a third on Trigonometry. "Whether these works, 
which were designed for popular use, proved profit- 
able to him, or whether his family assisted him, I 
know not ; but his fortunes seem to have prospered 
within the next four or five years, enough at any 
rate to enable him to travel on the Continent. 
When Chorley became one of the staff of The Athe- 
naeum, in the autumn of 1833, he was wandering in 
Italy, but sending contributions to that journal — let- 
ters on Art which Chorley says were written in a 
forced and affected style, but which were pregnant 
with research, unborrowed speculations, excellent 
touches, by which the nature of a work and its 
maker are characterized. " The taste in composi- 
tion, the general severity of the judgments pro- 



220 GEOEGE DAELEY 

nounced might be questioned, but no one could 
read them without being spurred to compare and 
think. In particular, he laid stress on the elder 
painters, whose day had not come for England — on 
Giotto, Francesco Francia, and Leonardo da Vinci." 
Never having seen those letters, I can neither con- 
firm nor contradict Chorley's opinion of them ; but, 
judging from Darley's Letters to the Dramatists, I 
should say that they were not so much forced and 
affected as original and individual. There were, no 
doubt, mannerisms in his way of writing, but no af- 
fectations, I think ; certainly no such mannerisms as 
in Carlyle or Sterne. 

When Darley returned to England he, like Chor- 
ley, became one of the staff of The Athenaeum, filling 
the chair of Dramatic Criticism, whence he delivered 
his judgments without fear or favor, and where he 
did poor Chorley an ill turn by the severity with 
which he noticed Talfourd's Ion, which enjoyed a 
singular but not long-lived popularity. Chorley's 
recollection of the circumstance is a specimen of 
melancholy humor. "I was only known to Mr. 
Talfourd," he says, " as one who wrote in The Athe- 
naeum, and having in person expressed to him what 
I thought and felt in regard to the play, it was 
necessary for me at once, with the utmost earnest- 
ness, to write to him on the appearance of the criti- 
cism, against which I had privately protested, but in 



GEORGE DARLEY 221 

vain, with the strongest possible disclaimer of its 
unjust and uncouth severity, and an equally strong- 
assertion of my own utter powerlessness to interfere 
in suppression or mitigation. My letter, I fear, 
was not believed to be sincere. It was said that, 
had I been in earnest, I could easily have at- 
tested my sincerity by entire withdrawal from a 
publication so wicked and malignant — a stringent 
suggestion, truly ! " Stringent, but just like Tal- 
fourd, who used to travel all over England to see 
Ion played. 

Miss Mitford places Darley among Unrecognized 
Poets, and there, I fear, he will ever remain. I 
never met with anyone who had read his Sylvia, or 
his two tragedies, Thomas a Becket, (1840), and 
Athelstan, (1841), or his Nepenthe, a poem in two 
cantos, which was privately printed but never pub- 
lished. He is known, so far as he is known, by his 
edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, (1840), which we 
must have on our shelves, whether we read it or 
not. That his life was a lonely and unhappy one, 
may be imagined from the impediment in his 
speech, which he called " his mask," and from his 
failure to win the reputation that he coveted. The 
love of fame may or not be the infirmity of noble 
minds that the young Milton supposed, but its loss 
is certainly a trial. "It is impossible not to sympa- 
thize with such trial," Miss Mitford says, "not to 



222 GEORGE DAELEY 

feel how severe must be the sufferings of a man, 
conscious of no common power, who sees, day by 
day, the popularity for which he yearns won by far 
inferior spirits, and works which he despises passing 
through edition after edition, while his own writings 
are gathering dust upon the publisher's shelves, or 
sold as waste paper to the pastry-cook or chandler. 
What wonder that the disenchanted poet should be 
transmuted into a cold and caustic critic, or that the 
disappointed man should -withdraw into the nar- 
rowest limits of a friendly society, a hermit in the 
centre of London ! " But if Darley's life was an un- 
happy one, it was not spun out beyond the allotted 
years of man ; for it terminated in 1846. When the 
danger of his last illness was imminent some of his 
London friends wrote to a brother of his in Dublin ; 
but no answer was returned. They w 7 rote again 
still more urgently ; and then after his death and 
burial it was discovered that his brother was dead 
also. 

When I began this chat about George Darley I 
meant to say something about his Letters to the 
Dramatists, which are admirable criticisms on the 
later Poetic Drama of England, and about his 
Sylvia, which is conceived in the spirit of the 
masques of the Jacobean and Carolian poets, and 
of which the noblest example is Comus. But on 
second thoughts I forbear, believing that the prose 



GEORGE DARLEY 223 

and verse of Darley are better than anything I can 
say about them. Here is one of his lyrics from the 
fourth act of Sylvia, wherein it is sung at daybreak 
by the hero, Romanzo : 

Awake thee, my Lady-love ! 

Wake tliee, and rise ! 
The sun through the bower peeps 

Into thine eyes ! 

Behold how the early lark 

Springs from the corn ! 
Hark, hark how the flower-bird 

Winds her wee horn ! 

The swallow's glad shriek is heard 

All through the air ! 
The stock-dove is murmuring 

Loud as she dare ! 

Apollo's winged bugleman 

Cannot contain, 
But peals his loud trumpet call 

Once and again ! 

Then wake thee, my Lady-love ! 

Bird of my bower ! 
The sweetest and sleepiest 

Bird at this hour ! 



224 GEORGE DARLEY 

Here is something more exquisite still, a perfect 
lyric, which any poet, the greatest, might be proud 
to have written : 

Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers, 
Lulled by the faint breezes sighing through her hair ; 

Sleeps she, and hears not the melancholy numbers 
Breathed to my sad lute amid the lonely air ! 

Down from the high cliff the rivulet is teeming, 

To wind round the willow banks that lure him from 
above : 

O that, in tears from my rocky prison streaming, 
I, too, could glide to the bower of my love ! 

Ah, where the woodbines with sleepy arms have wound her, 
Opes she her eyelids at the dream of my lay ; 

Listening, like the dove, while the fountains echo round 
her, 
To her lost mate's call in the forests far away ! 

Come, then, my bird, for the peace thou ever bearest, 
Still Heaven's messenger of comfort to me ; 

Come ! this fond bosom, my faithfulest, my fairest, 
Bleeds with its death-wound — but deeper yet for thee ! 

I know — alas ! no, I knew — one poet, who was 
never tired of that divine song — my dead friend, 
Bayard Taylor. 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

The beginnings of literature, so far as we can re- 
cover them from history or tradition, or detect 
them from critical analysis, were in individual 
minds, of whose activity they were an exhibition and 
a record. They arrested the attention, if they did 
not challenge the admiration, of the early races of 
men through their personality, whose assertion was 
its authentication, and whose manifestation was its 
might. The literary fathers of the world spoke for 
themselves and out of themselves, and were domin- 
ant as long as the world believed in them. But it 
was not for long ; for often before they died their 
children abandoned the primitive speech for the 
languages that prevailed around them. Originality, 
then conventionality, inspiration, then imitation, ge- 
nius, then talent. This, in little, is the history of 
literature as it is the history of man, which is one 
of races, not one of persons. The sovereigns of lit- 
erature have never been numerous enough to gov- 
ern the world continuously, either alone or in lineal 
succession ; for however potent the great may have 
15 



226 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

been, their comings and goings were not solar or 
stellar, but cometary or meteoric — "few and far be- 
tween." The greater, the fewer, and the more 
apart. There has been but one Homer, one Horace, 
one Dante, one Calderon, one Shakespeare. The 
law-givers have gone, and gone forever ; for though 
their laws remain on the statute books there is none 
to interpret them intelligently, or administer them 
justly. 

There was a freshness and a force in all early 
literatures ; but they grew less and less the more 
these literatures were cultivated, shrinking and 
shrinking until the spontaneous utterance of natural 
feeling dwindled into the studied expression of 
measured emotion — until things became words. The 
strength of a literature diminishes as it becomes 
literary, and it must be literary before it is na- 
tional ; for however ready men may have been in 
the beginning to believe in leaders, they have come 
to believe in themselves, and to follow no leaders 
except those that they select and direct. To be 
popular now is to cater for and submit to the popu- 
lace. But there are — as there always have been 
and will be — men who cannot and will not do this, 
and to neglect them is not to silence them, nor to 
ignore their work to suppress it. They may miss 
popularity, but they achieve distinction, for, un- 
known to many, they are known to the few for all 



THOMAS LOYE PEACOCK 227 

time. So known are Walter Savage Landor, Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald, and Thomas Love Peacock, who 
have all written unforgetable books, the most enter- 
taining, if not the most notable, of which are Pea- 
cock's. 

They are of the kind which one reads every word 
deliberately and admiringly, noting the order in 
which the words follow each other, file after file, to 
a music of their own, and noting at the same time 
the thoughts and feelings which accompany them, 
charmed by their sweetness and grace, and capti- 
vated by the intelligence whose ministers and ser- 
vitors they are. We read most books for what they 
are, with no thought of their authors ; but we read 
these books for the sake of their authors, who are 
present on every page, and vital in every line. 

The life of Peacock, though a long and busy one, 
was not one that a biographer would be likely to 
seize upon as affording him an opportunity to in- 
dulge in narrations of adventure, or speculations of 
a spiritual nature. It was devoid of incident and 
averse from publicity, other than is implied in au- 
thorship ; but it suited the temperament it nurtured, 
and the mind in which it awakened observation, and 
to which it supplied experience. Fortunate in his 
birth, whereby he was spared the penury which is 
so often the inheritance of genius, the only child of 
Samuel Peacock, a prosperous London merchant, 



228 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

the head of the firm of Peacock & Pallat, and of 
Sarah Love, the eldest daughter of Thomas Love, 
who was connected with the British Navy, Thomas 
Love Peacock was born on October 18, 1785, at Wey- 
mouth, where he lived until the death of his father, 
three years later, when he was taken b}' his widowed 
mother to Chertsey, where his boyhood was passed. 
He was a favorite with his grandfather, who was 
never tired of describing to him the battles in which 
he had fought (he had lost one of his legs in an ac- 
tion in the West Indies, where Lord Rodney had 
defeated the French under Admiral de Grasse), and 
he was highly thought of by the pedagogue under 
whom he was instructed at Englefield Green, who 
prophesied that he would prove one of the most re- 
markable men of the day. Admired by his master, 
and beloved by his grandfather, he was so beautiful 
as a child that he attracted the attention of Queen 
Caroline, who once stopped her carriage to kiss him 
and smooth his flaxen curls, which hung in profu- 
sion below his waist. He remained at school until 
he was thirteen, and greatly, it would seem, to his 
advantage ; for though his master was not much of 
a scholar, he had good assistants in French and the 
classics, and had besides an apt pupil in Thomas, 
who was early impressed with the doctrine of Har- 
ris, the author of Hermes, that it was as easy to 
become a scholar as a gambler. Thus encouraged, 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 229 

Master Peacock took to reading the best books, il- 
lustrated by the best critics, and was so far ad- 
vanced in learning when he left school that it was 
not thought necessary to send him to college. 

When he was about sixteen he was taken from 
Chertsey to London, where he began a course of 
study in the British Museum, devoting his days to 
the literature of Greece and Rome, and the history 
of art, architecture, and other branches of ancient 
learning. He was of the stuff of which great schol- 
ars are made, readily mastering whatever he under- 
took, and retaining what he acquired to the last 
day of his life. His earliest intellectual efforts were 
in the direction of verse, in the cultivation of which 
his success was not equal to his ambition. His first 
volume, Palmyra and Other Poems, which was pub- 
lished in his twenty-first year, attracted no atten- 
tion, and deserved to attract none ; for, except in its 
notes, which were derived from Wood, Voltaire, Gib- 
bon, Ossian, and the Bible, it was dreary reading. 

At the age of twenty-three he accepted an appoint- 
ment as under-secretary to Sir Home Popham, Com- 
mander of the Venerable, a post which was not to 
his liking, since it interfered with his poetical pur- 
suits, which were only exercised now, when they 
were exercised at all, in the writing of Prologues 
and Addresses in the patriotic manner of Dibdin, 
the Tyrtasus of the British tar, whom his dauntless 



230 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

numbers fired to the extermination of Johnny Cra- 
paud. After a year of this servitude he went back 
to civil life and the pacific service of the Muse, who, 
withholding her smiles from him in Tadmor's mar- 
ble waste, might, perhaps, be propitious to him at 
home. He had projected a year before a poem on 
the Thames, and to the poem thus projected he now 
returned, putting himself in training for it in a 
series of pedestrian tours, through which he pur- 
posed to trace the progress of the river from its 
source to its outlet. The notion of preparing for a 
poem by such means, arid of composing a poem on 
such a theme, would not occur to any poet or poet- 
aster now ; for whatever poetry may be now, it is 
not topographical. But it was otherwise when the 
century was new, and verse of all kinds was in de- 
mand ; so Peacock walked his hundreds of miles, 
and wrote his hundreds of lines, and, finishing both, 
published The Genius of the Thames (1810), which 
must have met with some favor, since it passed into 
a second edition. 

Peacock did not discover the genius of poetry 
which he sought so assiduously in his pilgrimage 
along the Thames ; but he encountered another 
genius which consoled him in his disappointment— 
the genius of pedestrianism. He was led by the 
spirit in his feet into North Wales, a sequestered 
region, abounding in mountain scenery, the gloom 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 231 

of savage woods, the noise of splashing waterfalls, 
and the long inherited silence of mysterious vales. 
His first lodge in the wilderness was Maentwrog, of 
which he speedily became enamoured, exploring it in 
all directions, climbing the rocks, tracking the rivers, 
and wandering along the sea, carrying in his mind 
the law in triad, that the poet should have an eye 
that can see Nature, a heart that can feel Nature, 
and a resolution that dares follow Nature. Here, 
soon after his arrival, in the winter of 1810, he 
made the acquaintance of a clergyman, Dr. Griffidh, 
whose daughter Jane was famous for her beauty, 
and whose scholarship was sufficient to enable her 
to talk with Peacock about Scipio, Hannibal, and 
the Emperor Otho. 

Peacock seems to have had no acquaintance with 
literary folk until his twenty-seventh year, when he 
met Shelley, who not long before had succeeded in 
having himself expelled from Oxford, and in eloping 
with the daughter of a well-to-do publican, whom 
he had married at Edinburgh. They met at Nant 
Gwilt, near Rhayader, where the young couple were 
staying in one of their financial crises, and the ac- 
quaintance soon ripened into friendship. 

If Shelley could have known Peacock at an earlier 
period, the difference in their ages (Peacock being 
seven years the senior) and their intellectual aims 
and habits, might have guided his wandering steps 



232 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

into easier ways than the thorny paths through 
which he was stumbling. No influence with which 
he had yet come in contact was so healthful, and 
none at any time so sane and unselfish. It was his 
misfortune to be misunderstood, his biographers 
tell us, and in a certain sense they are right ; but 
his greatest misfortune was in misunderstanding 
himself, and the people who professed to be his 
friends. They were a bad lot, forerunners of a 
sect who are still among us, and who are always 
more noisy than numerous — egotists who mistake 
their individual ignorance for universal knowledge, 
and their vagaries of conduct for philosophical life ; 
reformers who, mad in reforming others, never re- 
form themselves, superior to morality, which they 
deride, gluttonous in sensual enjoyments, profuse 
at the expense of others, revolutionary in politics, 
and agnostics in religion. He could not have fall- 
en into worse hands. 

It was not long before the Shelleys changed their 
residence, removals with or without cause being one 
of their habits, and when Peacock met them again 
they were living at Bracknell, with an addition of 
two to their household, one being Mrs. Shelley's sis- 
ter, Eliza Westbrook, the other her newly born 
daughter, Ianthe. It was not a happy household, 
partly because Shelley disliked his sister-in-law, 
whose assumption of superiority was irritating, and 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 233 

partly because Harriet did not nurse her child, as he 
thought she ought to do. He was fond of the child, 
with whom he used to walk up and down a room for 
a long time, holding it in his arms, and singing to 
it a monotonous melody of his own, which ran on 
the repetition of the word " Yahmani ! Yahmani ! " 
which grated on the ears of Peacock ; for Shelley's 
voice was harsh and high, though it soothed the 
child when it was fretful. They were surrounded 
by their queer set of friends, at whom the satirical 
Peacock must needs laugh, an irreverent proceeding 
in which he was joined by Mrs. Shelley, and which 
disgraced the pair in the eyes of the elect. Their 
follies infected the sensitive mind of Shelley, who 
imagined on one occasion that an unknown ruffian 
had attempted to assassinate him, and that he had 
preserved his life only after a valorous struggle in 
which he had discharged his pistols, and on another 
occasion that a fat old woman who sat opposite to 
him in a coach was afflicted with elephantiasis, and 
that he had caught it from her. " He was contin- 
ually on the watch for its symptoms ; his legs were 
to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was 
to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would 
draw the skin of his own hands, arms, and neck very 
tight, and if he discovered any deviation from 
smoothness, he would seize the person next to him, 
and endeavor by a corresponding process to see if 



234 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

any corresponding deviation existed. He often 
startled young ladies in an evening party by this 
singular process, which was as instantaneous as a 
flash of lightning.'' Peacock quoted Lucretius to 
him, and he was comforted. 

Peacock seems to have known more of the relation 
between Shelley and his wife than any of their com- 
mon friends, and as far as he allowed himself to sit 
in judgment upon them, his judgment was in her 
favor. He certainly sympathized with her, and he 
defended her memory long after her death. He was 
not the man, however, to take sides with either ; 
for, knowing both as he did, he probably thought 
they were both to blame. Shelley met Mary God- 
win, and not remembering to be off with the old 
love before he was on with the new, he abandoned 
his Harriet, and ran away with his Mary. The 
Shelley-Godwin pair returned to England after a 
short sojourn on the Continent, and went into lodg- 
ings in London, where they received but few vis- 
itors ; for, as might be expected, many of their 
friends fell off from them. Peacock was not of the 
number, for he often used to pass his evenings with 
them. Shelley's chief employment at this time was 
the raising of money on his expectations from the 
race which Byron denominated " Jews and their fel- 
low-Christians ; " and his chief pastime the sailing of 
paper boats on the Surrey Canal and the Serpentine. 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 235 

These boats, particularly those that he launched on 
the Serpentine, he freighted with halfpence, in the 
presence of boys who, watching their course, ran 
round to the side at which they were likely to land, 
and scrambled for their contents. They shouted 
when they captured those little argosies, and Shelley, 
who was still a boy at heart, as loudly as the rest. 

Peacock and his mother spent the summer of 1815 
at Great Marlow, where he used to walk to Bishops- 
gate, the eastern entrance of Windsor Park, where 
Shelley had taken a furnished house, and spend a 
few days with him. They made an excursion to- 
gether in a shell, on the Thames, going wherever 
they would if the water was high enough to float 
them. Shelley was in poor condition when they 
started, owing to his diet of bread, butter, and tea ; 
but when he consented to follow Peacock's pre- 
scription of well-peppered mutton chops, he braced 
up at once, and, what with the fine weather and his 
vigorous rowing, enjoyed himself hugely. 

Before Peacock knew Shelley his authorship was 
amateurish and tentative, displaying more confidence 
than capacity, and betraying ignorance in all its as- 
sumptions of knowledge ; but when he began to 
know Shelley he began to know himself and his 
shortcomings. His first discovery was that he was 
not a poet ; for, whatever he may have thought of 
his Genius of the Thames, he could no longer believe 



236 THOMAS LOYE PEACOCK 

that after reading Alastor. His next discovery was 
that he was a prose writer, and that his walk in 
prose was that of satire. His writing hitherto had 
been imitative, henceforth it should be original ; it 
had reflected books, it should now reflect men. He 
proceeded, therefore, to make studies, not from a 
dramatic, but from a philosophic, point of view, not 
of passions, but fashions. He was not a student of 
character, like Shakespeare, but a student of hu- 
mors, like Ben Jonson. 

Cogitation like this must have passed through the 
mind of Peacock in the society of Shelley and his 
friends, who were an education to him, and through 
whom, consciously or unconsciously, he completed 
his apprenticeship in, and became a master of, the 
literary art. His first work after his emancipation 
was Headlong Hall, which was written about the 
time when Shelley wrote Alastor, and was published 
in the same year. It was followed within the next 
two years by Melincourt, Nightmare Abbey, and 
Khododaphne. Why, after having scored a brilliant 
success in prose, as he certainly did in his novels, he 
should have gone back to verse in Rhododaphne is 
one of those puzzles with which the lives of men of 
genius abound, and which weaken, if they do not 
destroy, our belief in their self-knowledge. Rhodo- 
daphne was a delusion, and an aberration on the 
part of Peacock, in whom, at the age of thirty-three, 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 237 

it was inexcusable. It possesses no interest in itself, 
and is only interesting in the history of modern 
English poetry when compared with the Endymion 
of Keats, which was written at the same time. There 
was no comparison between the two men ; for Pea- 
cock was a Grecian, and Keats was not. But he was 
better than a Grecian — he was a Greek, as Landor 
said, and, better still he was a great poet. 

Peacock was one of the few English authors of our 
time whose reputation was beneficial and not preju- 
dicial to his worldly interests. It came to be known 
to the directors of the East India Company, who, un- 
like such bodies generally (at least as they exist here), 
were not averse from clever men, outside their own 
relatives and dependents, and they offered him a 
clerkship in their Examiner's office, and allowed him 
six weeks to prepare for his examination. He passed 
triumphantly, his papers being returned with the 
indorsement, "Nothing superfluous, and nothing 
wanting." So, in 1819, a year after the publication 
of Nightmare Abbey, he entered the service of the 
India Company, and the next year married the 
daughter of his Welsh friend, Dr. Gryffdh, whom he 
had not seen for eight years. 

The biographical interest that attached to Peacock 
during his six years' acquaintance with, and friend- 
ship for, Shelley and his wives, did not follow him 
into the India House, where he took his place among 



238 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

a score of other clerks, and performed the duties 
that were assigned to him. There are minds to 
which official duties are so distasteful that they 
shuffle through them negligently, some with a silly 
sense of humiliation which they resent, others with 
a careless condescension which they cultivate. There 
are other, and wiser, minds which accept these du- 
ties willingly and cheerfully, and find a pleasure 
in performing them faithfully. Such a mind was 
Peacock's, which may have been sarcastic, but was 
singularly sane, and such a mind was Lamb's, which 
kept its whimsicality for home consumption, though 
it was occasionally dilatory in the morning. 

One would like to know that Peacock was ac- 
quainted with Lamb, who was also a clerk in the 
India House, and he may have been, though I do not 
recall any tradition to that effect. They were not 
authors but clerks in the India House, where their 
penmanship was expended in day-books and ledgers, 
not in novels and essays. They moved in different 
circles, and led different lives : Lamb in dingy lodg- 
ings with his old books, his crazy sister, and the 
queer cronies who washed down his cold mutton 
with mugs of porter ; Peacock in a cosey house in 
Stamford Street, Blackfriars, with his beloved clas- 
sics, his beautiful Welsh wife, and his rosy chil- 
dren. The world went well with Peacock, but not 
so well with Lamb, for what with his frequency of 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 239 

gin and water, and his weeping pilgrimages to the 
madhouse with his poor sister, a shadow was on his 
life. 

Peacock's services in the India House were appre- 
ciated and rewarded, for before his third year there 
was ended he was promoted to the staff of the Cor- 
respondence Department. Fourteen years later he 
rose to the chief post as Examiner, succeeding James 
Stuart Mill, the author of the History of British In- 
dia, and being succeeded, in 1856, by his more famous 
son, John Stuart Mill. He was thereupon retired, 
after thirty-seven years active and honorable service, 
with an annual pension of £1,333, 6s. Sd. During 
his clerkly life he wrote three novels — Maid Marian, 
in 1822 ; The Misfortunes of Elphin, in 1829 ; and 
Crotchet Castle, in 1831. The first two of them 
more nearly fulfilled the conditions that custom has 
imposed upon the novel, pure and simple, than the 
two which preceded them and the two which came 
after them, the last of which, Gryll Grange, was 
published in 1860. The freshness, the frankness, 
the jovial, romantic spirit, and hearty love of out- 
door life, which animated every page of Maid Ma- 
rian, insured its immediate success. Dramatized by 
Planche as an opera, for which Bishop composed 
the music, it was produced at Covent Garden, 
where Charles Kemble made a hit in one of its 
songs, which is said to have been the only song 



240 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

that he ever learned to sing in his whole career. It 
was also translated into German. 

The last ten years of Peacock's life were passed at 
Halliford, where, surrounded by his books, his chil- 
dren and grandchildren, his friends, and his dogs, 
he led the life of a prosperous country gentleman 
— scholarly in his habits, courtly in his manners, 
humorous and witty in his conversation, a gracious 
host, and a kindly master. He enjoyed the repose 
he had earned, and clung to the customs of his 
youth, always keeping May Day in the good old 
English fashion, inviting all the village children to 
his grounds, where they were rewarded according 
to the beauty of their garlands with new pennies or 
silver threepences, the largess being bestowed upon 
them by the Queen of the May, who was one of his 
grand-daughters, and sat beside him in a white 
dress, with a wreath of flowers on her head, and a 
sceptre of flowers in her hand. He delighted in his 
garden, where he fed his birds, which were never 
startled by the noise of guns, for no guns were al- 
lowed to be fired on his place ; but his happiest 
hours were spent in his library, which, like Pros- 
pero's, was dukedom enough, and which, when a fire 
broke out in the roof of his bedroom, he refused to 
leave, asseverating with energy; "By the immortal 
gods, I will not move ! " He died on January 23, 
1866, his eighty-first year, and was buried at Shep- 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 241 

perton, close to his third daughter, Bosa, his grave 
being marked by a stone, with only his name and 
the date of his birth and death inscribed thereon. 

The stories of Peacock must be read for what 
they are, and nothing else, or not read at all. To 
read them as we do novels is to read them to no 
purpose. They are not novels, and were not meant 
to be novels. Their plots, if the incidents of which 
they are composed can be called plots, are of the 
slightest, and not of a kind that creates interest and 
awakens sympathy, either through the action they 
involve, or the characters they present. They are a 
succession of scenes and a procession of persons — a 
succession of scenes in English country houses, such 
as are described in Headlong Hall and Nightmare 
Abbey, a procession of persons such as we may 
suppose to inhabit them, and visit them, and enjoy 
their hospitality. United by the ties of good breed- 
ing and good fellowship, they have enough in com- 
mon to like each other heartily, and enough indi- 
viduality to differ from each other widely. Some of 
them have very decided views, the discussion of 
which forms the staple of their conversation. The 
master of the house in which these discussions are 
held is usually a doctrinaire, who has no sympathy 
with other doctrinaires, and who, like Iago, is noth- 
ing if not critical. 

Peacock's prose is what Matthew Arnold main- 
16 



242 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

tained poetry should be — a criticism of life, not life 
in the abstract, but life in the concrete — the social, 
political, national life of his own people and period. 
He was thoroughly English in his conservatism ; 
certain of present, but doubtful of future, good. 
One of his pet aversions was political economy, 
another was phrenology, a third was animal mag- 
netism, which was odious because it originated in 
the United States. Americans were repugnant to 
him, and Scotchmen, even Scott, whose books were 
written in all the worst dialects of the English lan- 
guage. Like "Wordsworth, he was inimical to rail- 
roads, that hurry about people who have nothing to 
do, and telegraphs, that convey the words of people 
who have nothing to say. He was prone to preju- 
dice and paradox, or pretended to be in order to 
show his wit. When we read him we should re- 
member that he was a humorist and a satirist, and 
that he wrote dramatically, assuming for the mo- 
ment the personality of his characters, for whose 
opinions and utterances he was not responsible. He 
was satirical, but not cynical — a sharp-witted, but 
good-natured censor. He handled his victims as 
Izaak Walton handled his worms — as if he loved 
them, and if they did not condone their impale- 
ment, they ought to have done so. Shelley did, 
for he not only forgave but admired Peacock's carica- 
ture as Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey. 



THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 243 

Peacock was not a poet in the sense that his 
friend Shelley was, but he possessed rare poetical 
gifts. He was essentially a lyrist, and one of the 
best these later days have seen, his touch being as 
sure as it was light. Here is one of his lyrics, which 
I am afraid to praise lest I praise it too much : 

The War Song of Dinas Vawr. 

The mountain sheep are sweeter, 
But the valley sheep are fatter ; 
We therefore deemed it meeter 
To carry off the latter. 
We made an expedition ; 
We met an host and quelled it : 
We forced a strong position, 
And killed the men who held it. 

On Dyfed's richest valley, 

Where heads of kine were browsing, 

We made a mighty sally, 

To furnish our carousing. 

Fierce warriors rushed to meet us ; 

We met them, and o'erthrew them ; 

They struggled hard to beat us ; 

But we conquered them, and slew them. 

As we drove our prize at leisure, 
The king marched forth to catch us ; 
His rage surpassed all measure, 
But his people could not match us. 



244 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 

He fled to the hall-pillars ; 
And, ere our force we led off, 
Some sacked his house and cellars, 
And others cut his head off. 

We there, in strife bewildering, 
Spilt blood enough to swim in : 
We orphaned many children, 
And widowed many women. 
The eagles and the ravens 
We glutted with our foemen : 
The heroes and the craven, 
The spearmen and the bowmen. 

We brought away from battle, 

And much their land bemoaned them, 

Two thousand head of cattle, 

And the head of him who owned them ! 

Endyfed, King of Dyfed, 

His head was borne before us ; 

His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, 

And his overthrow our chorus. 






EDWARD FITZGERALD 

There are, and always have been, in the literatures 
of all peoples who have attained to literature, a body 
of authors, generally a small body, whose presence 
in authorship was more due to circumstances by 
which they were drifted thitherward than to any 
predisposition and predetermination on their part, 
and whose achievements therein were as unexpected 
by themselves as by their readers. Literature has 
never ranked among the professions which men 
have recognized as indispensable to their well-being 
— the professions which they oblige themselves to 
study, and to which when they have learned them 
they devote their lives ; learned professions, like 
law and medicine, theology and philosophy ; es- 
thetic professions, like painting, statuary, and 
music ; the civil professions involved in engineer- 
ing and mechanics, and the military professions in- 
volved in national defence and offence, soldiering 
and sailoring, with all their instruments of human 
destruction. Men have always been ready to be 
admirals and generals, builders of bridges and rail- 



246 EDWAED FITZGEEALD 

roads, composers and sculptors, doctors and judges 
and bishops ; but they have not been so ready to be 
poets and dramatists, novelists and essayists, or 
members of the craft less definable than those of 
whose nature they are partakers whom we call men 
of letters. " There be none so singular as authors," 
was the observation of a quaint old writer who hov- 
ered around, but was not admitted, within the guild 
of which he was the satirist and the eulogist ; "nas- 
citur nonfit, they understand their hornbooks before 
they see them, and skip in a twinkle from Priscian 
to Tullie. They learn without teaching, each being 
his own master and scholar. The knowledge that is 
cudgelled into others runs in their veins like ichor, 
and wherein their fellows are sterile they are more 
fruitful than Hesperian gardens. Life is their Uni- 
versity, and experience conferreth their degree of 
Magister Artem." 

The determination to literature is an instinct 
which escapes detection until it discovers itself, and 
which, when discovered, defies analysis. There 
seems to have been a time when it existed in the 
race rather than in the individual — in the mem or 
classes of men, to whom its beginnings are attrib- 
uted by tradition ; the minds which recorded the 
religious beliefs and observances of their peoples in 
the Hindu and Hebrew Scriptures, with whatever in 
the shape of history or legend struggled through 



EDWARD FITZGEEALD 247 

the rhythmical recollections of balladry into epic 
verse. To what extent great writers were the prod- 
uct of the ages in which they flourished, whether 
wholly, in some instances, or partly, in others, and 
to what extent the ages in which they flourished 
were moulded by them into the form and pressure 
they wore, is matter for speculation which would be 
worthy of all the study which could be bestowed 
upon it, if by any possibility a decisive conclusion 
could be reached. But no such conclusion can be 
reached ; for if history teaches anything, it teaches 
the impossibility of distinguishing between man and 
Nature, and of separating ages from their writers, 
and writers from their ages. Dante and his period 
are one and indivisible in the literary history of 
Italy, as Shakespeare and his period, and Pope and 
his period, are one and indivisible in the literary 
history of England. It has always been the distinc- 
tion of great writers that their writing authenticates 
itself. Not that they have always been themselves, 
for if the spirit was willing the flesh was weak, and 
to be long at their best has not been given to many ; 
but that there has always been something in their 
writing which was not in the writing of others — an 
individuality which was not to be mistaken, a per- 
sonality which was not to be imitated. But there 
are writers and writers — the greater, who, like 
sovereigns, govern the intellectual world by the 



248 EDWAED FITZGEEALD 

divine right of their own power, the lesser, who, 
like princes, rule over kingdoms by virtue of powers 
which are conferred upon them. Nor are these all, 
for there are others to whom provinces are subject 
whenever they make incursions therein. They come 
and go as they choose, reigning to-day and abdicating 
to-morrow, caring more for what they are, which may 
be little, than for what they might be, which would 
be much. Some are too modest to estimate their 
gifts at their true value, and some are too indolent, 
or too indifferent, to exercise their gifts. They are 
sufficient for themselves, and whatever they may be 
the love of fame is not among their infirmities. 

One of these unambitious men of letters was Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald, whose name, now that it is known 
to the readers of English verse in connection with 
the name of Omar Khayyam, will long be remem- 
bered. It will also be remembered among the 
names of those who have grappled with the task of 
translating Calderon, and it might be remembered 
in many ways if he could only have persuaded him- 
self to walk in those ways, either in his singing 
robes, or in the plain garments of prose. He was 
of a good family, his mother a Fitzgerald, and his 
father, who was her cousin, a Purcell, who on the 
death of her father assumed the name of Fitzgerald. 
Born on the last day of March, 1809, at Bredfield 
House, an old Jacobean mansion in Suffolk, Edward 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 249 

Fitzgerald was nurtured in English air until his 
seventh year, when the family was transplanted to 
France, in the first place at St. Germain, the for- 
est of which was enlivened with royal hunting par- 
ties, which the boy never forgot, and later at Paris, 
where they occupied a house in which Robespierre 
had lived. Returning to England, he was sent, in 
his twelfth year, to King Edward the Sixth's school 
at Bury St. Edmunds, where two of his elder broth- 
ers were, and where he had for school-fellows James 
Spedding, whose life-work was to be the editorship 
of Bacon, J. M. Kemble, who was to become an 
authority in Anglo-Saxon, and others not so well 
known, from whom the world was to hear in coming 
days. Five years later he was entered at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, where his contemporaries were 
Spedding, the Tennysons — Frederick, Charles, and 
Alfred — and William Makepeace Thackeray. He 
was not emulous of university distinctions, nor was 
he what is called a reading man, entertaining him- 
self with music, drawing, and poetry. Taking his 
degree in his twenty-first year, he stopped for a 
time with a brother-in-law, and then ran over to 
Paris, where an aunt was living, and where he was 
joined by Thackeray. 

In the spring of the following year, when he was 
residing at Naseby, where his father had a consider- 
able estate, Fitzgerald wrote his first poem, or the 



250 EDWARD FITZGERALD 

first which has been preserved, for his college verse, 
unlike that of Tennyson and Hallam and others 
who, at Cambridge, contended for the prize that was 
offered for Timbuctoo, has perished, and a remark- 
able poem it is. It was printed in Hone's Year 
Book for April 30, 1831, and copied into the Athe- 
naeum, where it was seen by Lamb, who, in writing 
to Moxon, said he envied the writer of it, because 
he felt he could have done something like it him- 
self. He might have done so, no doubt, when he 
wrote his Old Familiar Faces, but not much later, 
and certainly not then, when he was scarcely equal 
to the writing of his platitudinous Album Verses. 
There is a quality in this poem, which was entitled 
The Meadows in Spring, that smacks of a primitive 
time, when feelings were fresh and joyous, and 
words alive — a childly simplicity and a manly direct- 
ness, a frankness and sincerity — the charm and grace 
of truth. This quality may be inferred from the 
first four stanzas (there are thirteen in all), which 
must, I feel sure, have been in the mind of Long- 
fellow when he wrote A Midnight Mass for the Dy- 
ing Year. Here they are : 

'Tis a dull sight 

To see the year dying, 
When winter winds 

Set the yellow wood sighing ; 
Sighing, oh ! sighing. 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 251 

When such a time cometh, 

I do retire 
Into an old room 

Beside a bright fire — 
O pile a bright fire ! 

And there I sit 

Reading old things, 
Of knights and lorn damsels, 

While the wind sings — 
O, drearily sings ! 

I never look out 

Nor attend to the blast ; 
For all to be seen 

Is the leaves falling fast ; 
Falling, falling. 

The life of Fitzgerald was so apart from the things 
which go to the making of what most biographers 
consider Lives, that if he had been asked to tell its 
story, he would probably have shaken his head with 
a grave smile, and quoted the words of the Needy 
Knife-grinder, " Story, God bless you ! I have none 
to tell, sir." It was an easy life, in that it demanded 
no exertion from Fitzgerald, who, from the allowance 
which he received from his father, was in comfortable 
circumstances, and, consequently, master of himself 
and his time ; it was an intellectual life, in that it 
was devoted to reading and thinking, and it was a 
friendly life, in that it enriched, and was enriched 



252 EDWARD FITZGERALD 

by, the lives of his friends, between whom and him- 
self there was a constant stream of correspondence. 
He lived in his books, his thoughts, and his letters. 
What his letters were we know, thanks to the loving 
care of his executor, Mr. William Aldis Wright, by 
whom they were diligently collected and published 
in the first of the three volumes that constitute his 
Literary Remains. They cover a period of more 
than fifty years, the earliest that has been recovered 
dating in the spring of 1830, the latest in the summer 
of 1883, and are of great value, since they enable 
us to enter and understand the unique personality 
of which they are at once a record and revelation ; 
of greater value in some ways, I think, than the 
books which he wrote for publication, in which, as 
in all books that are worthy of publication, the lit- 
erary element predominates. 

He put himself in his letters, as Cowper did, as 
Byron did, as Keats did ; and if they can be said to 
resemble the letters of either, they resemble those 
of Keats, in their naturalness, their sincerity, their 
frank communicativeness, their hearty kindness, and 
their unstudied humor. They are interesting in a 
literary sense as showing the course of his studies, 
which is traceable in the books that he read from 
time to time, and the fruition of those studies in his 
opinion of these books. They tell us, for example, 
that in the year after he left college he was reading 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 253 

Bacon's Essays, Evelyn's Sylva, Browne's Religio 
Medici, and that he admired the eloquence of the 
last, and the beauty of its notions, more than he had 
done before. He thought Hazlitt's Poets the best 
selection he had ever seen, and he had read some 
Chaucer, too, which he liked. Six days later (No- 
vember 27, 1832), he had something to say about 
Shakespeare's Sonnets, of which he thought as high- 
ly as Keats. "I have been reading Shakespeare's 
Sonnets ; and I believe I am unprejudiced when 
I say, I had not an idea of him, demigod as he 
seemed before, till I had read them carefully. How 
could Hazlitt call Warton's the finest sonnets? There 
is the air of pedantry and labor in his, but Shakes- 
peare's are perfectly simple, and have the very es- 
sence of tenderness that is only to be found in the 
best parts of his Borneo and Juliet besides." 

Further on in the same letter he refers to The 
Happy Life of Sir Henry Wotton, which he calls 
very beautiful, and quotes a lyric from Lyly (whom 
he calls Lily), copying his verse as prose, and speaks 
of Back and Syde (meaning the merry old song with 
that refrain) as breathing both content and virtue, 
"with a little good drink over." But his reading 
was not confined to the older English poets, for 
about six months before this he mentioned a younger 
one, who had yet to discover wherein his strength 
lay, and to win through neglect and ridicule the 



254 EDWARD FITZGERALD 

great fame which is now his. " I have bought Ten- 
nyson's poems. How good Mariana is ! " And 
about a year later, after a night ride on the coach to 
London : "I forgot to tell you that when I came up 
in the mail, and fell a-dozing in the morning, the 
sights of the pages in crimson and the funerals 
which the Lady of Shalott saw and wove, floated 
before me ; really the poem has taken lodging in my 
poor head." Fitzgerald was greatly interested in 
the poetic growth of Tennyson, to whom he con- 
stantly referred in his letters. " Tennyson has been 
in town for some time," he wrote to one of his 
friends from London, in the autumn of 1833. " He 
has been making fresh poems, which are finer, they 
say, than any he has done. But I believe he is chiefly 
meditating on the purging and subliming of what 
he has already done, and repents that he has pub- 
lished at all yet. It is fine to see how in each suc- 
ceeding poem the smaller ornaments and fancies 
drop away, and leave the grand ideas single." 

A year and a half later he wrote to another friend 
from Manchester, and informed him that Tennyson 
had lately stayed with him at Ambleside. "I will 
say no more of Tennyson than that the more I have 
seen of him, the more cause I have to think him 
great. His little humors and grumpinesses were so 
droll that I was always laughing; and was often 
put in mind (strange to say) of my little unknown 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 255 

friend, Undine. I must, however, say, further, that 
I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of de- 
pression at times from the overshadowing of a so 
much more lofty intellect than my own ; this (though 
it may seem vanity to say so), I never experienced 
before, though I have often been with much greater 
intellects ; but I could not be mistaken in this uni- 
versality of his mind, and perhaps I have received 
some benefit in the now more distinct conscious- 
ness of my dwarfishness." 

About five years later he wrote to another friend 
from London : " We have had Alfred Tennyson on 
here ; very droll and very wayward ; and much sit- 
ting up of nights till two and three in the morn- 
ing with pipes in our mouths, at which good hour 
we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic 
music, which he does between growling and smok- 
ing, and so to bed." 

Fitzgerald's admiration of Tennyson was hearty, 
but not indiscriminate, for when he did not like his 
work he said so frankly. He was always outspoken, 
sometimes rather more outspoken than wise, as in a 
letter that he wrote to Frederick Tennyson, in May, 
1848 : " I had a note from Alfred three months ago, 
he was then in London, but is now in Ireland, I 
think, adding to his new poem, The Princess. Have 
you seen it ? I am considered a great heretic for 
abusing it ; it seems to me a wretched waste of 



256 EDWARD FITZGERALD 

power at a time of life when a man ought to be do- 
ing his best ; and I almost feel hopeless about Alfred 
now. I mean about his doing what he was born to 
do." Finishing this sentence, Fitzgerald proceeded 
at once to express his opinion of another writer, a 
common friend of Tennyson and himself : " On the 
other hand, Thackeray is progressing greatly in his 
line ; he publishes a novel in numbers, Vanity Fair, 
which began dull, I thought, but gets better every 
number, and has some very fine things indeed in it. 
He is become a great man, I am told ; goes to Hol- 
land House and Devonshire House, and for some rea- 
son or other will not write a word to me. But I am 
sure it is not because he is asked to Holland House." 

We gather fewer particulars than we could wish 
respecting Thackeray, whom Fitzgerald was con- 
stantly in the habit of meeting, but enough to see 
that he esteemed him highly ; and we see from a 
letter of Thackeray the esteem in which he held 
Fitzgerald. It was written in the autumn of 1852, 
on the eve of his departure for America : 

" My dearest old Feiend : I mustn't go away with- 
out shaking your hand, and saying farewell and God 
bless you. If anything happens to me, you by these 
presents must get ready the Book of Ballads which 
you like, and which I have not time to prepare be- 
fore embarking on this voyage. And I should like 
my daughters to know that you are the best and 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 257 

oldest friend their father ever had, and that you 
would act as such ; as my literary executor and so 
forth. My books would yield a something as copy- 
rights ; and, should anything occur, I have commis- 
sioned friends in good place to get a pension for my 
poor little wife. Does not this sound gloomily ? 
Well ; who knows what fate is in store ; and I feel 
not at all downcast, but very grave and solemn just 
at the brink of a great voyage. I shall send you a 
copy of Esmond to-morrow or so, which you shall 
yawn over when you are inclined. But the great 
comfort I have in thinking about my dear old boy is 
that recollection of our youth, when we loved each 
other as I do now while I write farewell." 

Carlyle, with whom Fitzgerald corresponded at 
considerable length about the battle-field at Naseby, 
which joined a portion of his father's estate, and who 
was about the most cantankerous Scotchman that 
ever maltreated the English tongue, smoothed his 
rugged front at the sight of Fitzgerald's handwrit- 
ing. " Thanks for your friendly human letter," he 
wrote in reply to one of his missives, " which gave 
us so much entertainment in the reading (at break- 
fast time the other day), and is still pleasant to think 
of. One gets so many mhuman letters, ovine, bo- 
vine, porcine, etc., etc. I wish you would write a 
little oftener ; when the beneficent Daimon suggests 
fail not to lend ear to him." 
17 



258 EDWAED FITZGEEALD 

Not long before his death Thackeray was asked by- 
one of his daughters which of his old friends he 
loved most, and he answered, " Why, dear old Fitz, 
to be sure, and Brookfield." And the Laureate, on 
hearing of Fitzgerald's death, wrote to a common 
friend : "I had no truer friend ; he was one of the 
kindliest of men, and I have never known one of 
so fine and delicate a wit. I had written a poem 
to him the last week, a dedication, which he will 
never see." 

The life of Fitzgerald flowed on like a quiet 
stream, the main body of which loitered about 
Boulge, Woodbridge, where he had a cottage. 
Here he lived year after year, reading his books, 
thinking his thoughts, and writing his letters. He 
was not a recluse, in spite of his lonely life, for 
whenever the whim took him he was up and off else- 
where, in town or country, to attend to some errand 
he had created, to see some sight he had neglected, 
or to stay with some old friend. He made frequent 
visits to London, drawn thither by his love of 
music, which was constant, his love of the drama, 
which was fluctuant, or his love of art, which at one 
time was a passion with him. He haunted the gal- 
leries and exhibitions, and prowled round the shops 
of old dealers, where he picked up (as he believed) 
rare bargains for a song. He criticised like a virtu- 
oso, and purchased like a novice, generally for him- 



EDWAKD FITZGEEALD 259 

self, occasionally for some friend who trusted in Ms 
judgment. One of these confiding amateurs was 
Bernard Barton, a Quaker poet, who had a minor 
vogue then, but is only known now because Lamb 
wrote him some pleasant letters, and who is men- 
tioned here only because Fitzgerald married his 
daughter, who, it is to be hoped, made him a rea- 
sonably good wife. 

Of Fitzgerald at or about this period we have a 
lively description from the pen of a clever observer 
— the Rev. George Crabbe, Rector of Merton, a 
grandson of the poet Crabbe, of whose homely verse 
Fitzgerald was to the last a hearty lover. "Fitz- 
gerald was living at Boulge Cottage w T hen I first 
knew him ; a thatched cottage of one story just out- 
side his father's park. No one was, I think, resi- 
dent at the hall. His mother would sometimes be 
there a short time, and would drive about in a 
coach and four black horses. This would be in 
1844, when he was thirty-six. He used to walk by 
himself, slowly, with a Skye terrier. I was rather 
afraid of him. He seemed a proud and very punc- 
tilious man. I think he was at this time often 
going of an evening to Bernard Barton's. He did 
not come to us, except occasionally, till 1846. He 
seemed to me when I first saw him much as he 
was when he died, only not stooping ; always like a 
grave, middle-aged man ; never seemed very happy 



260 EDWARD FITZGERALD 

or very light-hearted, though his conversation was 
most amusing sometimes." 

Fitzgerald was very fond of Mr. Crabbe's father, 
though they had several coolnesses, which, Mr. 
Crabbe thought was the fault of his father, who 
was rather notional. Fitzgerald had in his cottage 
an old woman to wait upon him, but he was care- 
ful not to make her do anything. " Sometimes he 
would give a little dinner — my father, Brooke, B. 
Barton, Churchyard — everything most hospitable, 
but not comfortable. In 1846 and 1847 he does 
not seem to have come much to Bredfield. Perhaps 
he was away a good deal. He was often away visit- 
ing his mother, or W. Browne, or in London, or at 
the Kerriches'. In 1848, 1849, and 1850, he was a 
good deal at Bredfield, generally dropping in about 
seven o'clock, singing glees with us, and then join- 
ing my father over his cigar, and staying late and 
often sleeping. He very often arranged concerted 
pieces for us to sing, in four parts, he being tenor. 
He sang very accurately, but had not a good voice. 
When E. F. G. was at Boulge, he always got up early, 
eat his small breakfast, stood at his desk reading or 
writing all the morning, eat his dinner of vegetables 
and pudding, walked with his Skye terrier, and then 
finished the day by spending the evening with us 
at the Bartons. He did not visit with the neighbor- 
ing gentlefolks, as he hated a set dinner-party." 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 261 

Outlines like these, the number of which might 
be increased, though the lines of themselves could 
not be strengthened without borrowing from fancy, 
constitute the chief facts of the life of Fitzgerald, 
which came to a sudden close on June 14, 1883, 
at the rectory of his friend Crabbe, who, on the fol- 
lowing day, announced the intelligence to his exec- 
utor : " He came last evening to pay his annual 
visit with my sisters, but did not seem in his usual 
spirits, and did not eat anything. At ten he said 
he would go to bed. I went up with him. At a 
quarter to eight I tapped at his door to ask how he 
was, and getting no answer went in and found him 
as if sleeping peacefully, but quite dead. A noble 
character has passed away." 

What Fitzgerald might have done with his gifts 
and his opportunities, his talents, his scholarship, 
and his competence, if he had devoted his days to 
literature, we may conjecture, but we cannot know. 
But he did not devote his day to literature, wherein 
he had no ambition to excel. He read and read, he 
thought and thought ; but he was averse from writ- 
ing books, and of the three which he published he 
prefixed his name to but one. This was his second 
book, Six Dramas from Calderon (1853) ; his first 
one, Euphranor (1851), stealing into the world 
anonymously, and dying silently — a fate which 
nearly overtook his last one, the Rubiyat of Omar 



262 EDWARD FITZGERALD 

Khayyam (1861), which, also published anony- 
mously, and at his expense, was luckily preserved 
by one of those miracles which sometimes illumi- 
nate the history of literature. Fitzgerald kept a 
few copies for himself, and gave the rest of the edi- 
tion to the publisher, who derived no profit from it, 
since it would not sell, and could scarcely be given 
away. Still there was something in it that made its 
way, a force that would be recognized, an imperish- 
able vitality, the vitality of the master, Omar Khay- 
yam, and the scholar, Edward Fitzgerald. 



t 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 

(LOED HOUGHTON) 

No nineteenth century poet was ever more hap- 
pily situated than Lord Houghton, who was blessed 
with whatever he most desired and enjoyed, and no 
poet of any century was ever fitted to perform so 
many and such different parts as he. Fortunate in 
his birth, his father, Robert Pemberton Milnes, be- 
ing a wealthy gentleman of good family in the West 
Riding of Yorkshire, his mother, the daughter of a 
viscount, there was nothing that a gentleman ought 
to have from youth to age that was not within his 
reach. He had only to wish to have. Carefully 
educated in childhood, shortly after completing his 
eighteenth year he was entered by his father at Trin- 
ity College, Cambridge, where he found himself 
in a remarkable circle. Dr. Wordsworth, a brother 
of the poet, was the master ; Whewell, whose forte 
was science and whose foible was omniscience, 
was the senior tutor ; and his fellow- students were 
such young men of genius and talents as John 
Stirling, Richard Chenevix Trench, Julius Hare, 



264 KICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 

William Makepeace Thackeray, Arthur Henry Hal- 
lam, and the three Tennysons, Frederick, Charles, 
and Alfred. Alfred the Great, as he was called by 
his friends before many years were over, was at- 
tracted by the personal appearance of young Kich- 
ard on the day that he himself entered college. 
" There is a man I should like to know," he said to 
himself ; " he looks the best-tempered fellow I ever 
saw." They spoke to each other, and were friends 
ever after. Milnes soon began to distinguish him- 
self by his ability as a debater, a circumstance which 
must have gratified his father, who had not only 
been the first man of his time at Trinity, but was 
famous for a speech which he had made in the 
House of Commons, where he represented the bor- 
ough of Pontefract — a speech which was so highly 
thought of that he was offered a seat in the Cabinet, 
either as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Secretary 
of War, both of which positions he at once declined, 
declaring that with his temperament he would not 
live a year. They were great orators, those young 
Trinitarians of two generations ago, and foremost 
among them was Milnes, who on one occasion freed 
his mind respecting the character of Voltaire : 
" During the stormy period of the French Eevolu- 
tion, and during the greater peril of the Empire un- 
der Napoleon, a lamp was kept perpetually burning 
on the tomb of Voltaire. France is greater now 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 265 

than she was then ; France is wiser now than she 
was then ; but that lamp does not burn upon the 
tomb of Voltaire." 

On another occasion they debated whether The 
Ancient Mariner of Coleridge, or the acts of a Mr. 
Martin would be most effectual in preventing cru- 
elty to animals, and Coleridge seems to have carried 
the day. 

About this time — his twentieth year — Milnes be- 
gan his literary career by contributing short re- 
views and bits of verse to the Athenaeum, and by 
competing with other singing birds of Trinity for 
the prize poem, the subject of which was Tim- 
buctoo. Here he crossed swords with Arthur Hal- 
lam and Alfred Tennyson, both of whom were his 
juniors, the former by about two years, the latter by 
about two months, and was worsted by both. Hal- 
lam was rash enough to choose the terza rima, a 
measure which never has been and never can be 
naturalized in English verse ; but Tennyson, wiser, 
was content with blank verse, of which he was soon 
to be a master. He had published two years be- 
fore a volume of verse in connection with his elder 
brother Charles, and it is the fashion now to say 
that he made a clever beginning therein — a verdict 
that was not reached by the contemporary critics of 
that collection. There was no promise in Poems by 
Two Brothers, but there was more than promise — 



266 EICHAKD MONCKTON MILNES 

there was performance — in Timbuctoo, which took, 
and deserved to take, the prize, surpassing as it 
did the best prize poems of the period. 

It was a period of transition in the poetic history 
of England, which within the eight years preceding- 
had been darkened by the taking off of three great 
poets— Keats, in 1821, Shelley, in 1822, and By- 
ron, in 1824. There was that in the genius of 
Byron which had for years dazzled the multitude of 
his countrymen with its fire and force, its fecundity 
and versatility, and obscured the saner and wiser 
gifts of his contemporaries, by one of whom his su- 
premacy was denied. Whether any of the Lake 
poets were just to Byron, may be doubted ; that 
none of them was generous and hearty in their re- 
cognition is certain. His audacities shocked the 
moral nature of Southey and Wordsworth, particu- 
larly Wordsworth, who, worshipping himself, ac- 
knowledged no excellence save his own. The dis- 
ciples of Wordsworth, whose numbers had never 
corresponded with their clamor, took heart after 
the death of Byron, and, assisted by the scantier 
disciples of Keats and Shelley, set about his intel- 
lectual dethronement. The revolt broke out at 
Cambridge, where, in the autumn of 1829, the 
young gentlemen of Trinity held a debate on 
Wordsworth and Byron, and a little later in the 
same year, when a deputation of them proceeded to 



EICHAED MONCKTOE" MILNES 267 

Oxford, where they maintained the superiority of 
Shelley to Byron, two of the three Shelleyites being 
Hallam and Milnes. 

The life of Milnes, for five or six years after leav- 
ing college, was passed in Germany, and Italy, and 
Greece. Lacking in incidents that call for enumer- 
ation and description, it was enjoyable in that it 
gratified his temperament, and important in that it 
assisted in the formation of his character. He had 
a nature that required change, a mind that was avid 
for knowledge, and the gift of making himself at 
home wherever he was. He agreed with the little 
Queen Anne's man in thinking that the proper study 
of mankind was man, and entering the world as his 
university -after leaving England, he studied the 
peoples among whom he sojourned. English to the 
core, he was more than English in his sympathy 
with other nationalities, and in his adaptability to 
their habits and modes of thought. 

Ripened by foreign travel, which was a liberal 
education to him, Milnes returned to England at 
the age of twenty-seven, and, residing with his 
parents, who had taken a house in London, he be- 
gan his social career. No young Englishman of his 
position and talents could begin life to-day with 
such advantages as he enjoyed ; for the England of 
the nineties is less literary, less artistic, than the 
England of the thirties. Fashionable people did 



268 EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 

not live so much for fashion then as now, or the 
fashion for which they lived was of a more intellect- 
ual kind. They thought more of the personalities 
than the purses of the guests whom they invited to 
dinner, and when they gave evening parties it was 
rather to enjoy good talk than costly music. They 
cultivated the art of conversation. He had two am- 
bitions — one to make a name in letters, the other to 
shine in society, and he pursued them with such 
ardor that it was difficult to say for a time which 
was the stronger. The first task to which he de- 
voted himself was the procuring of poetical contri- 
butions for a volume which Lord Northampton had 
undertaken to edit for the benefit of the Eev. 
Edward Smedley, an unfortunate man of letters 
who had lost his hearing, was losing his sight, and 
whose family was totally unprovided for. Milnes 
entered into the project warmly, and sought to en- 
list his literary friends, writing to Alford, Spedding, 
Hare, De Vere, and others, who responded heartily, 
and to Alfred Tennyson, who at first declined to 
help him, having taken an oath never to have any- 
thing to do with such vapid books. Milnes lost his 
temper, and answered in heat, but was soothed by a 
temperate reply, and the promise of a poem, which 
was duly received. The Tribute appeared in the 
summer of 1837, and as it was published by sub- 
scription, at a guinea a copy, it probably realized 



RICHAKD MONCKTOJS" MILNES 269 

something for the family of Smedley, who had died 
while it was in hand. It was better than most books 
published under similar conditions ; for though it 
was not enriched by much good poetry, it contained 
contributions from several good poets which had 
been procured by Milnes — among them Wordsworth, 
Southey, Moore, Landor, Milman, Montgomery, 
Joanna Bailie, Henry Taylor, Horace Smith, Bernard 
Barton, George Darley, Aubrey De Vere, Trench, 
Alford, and R M. Milnes and Alfred Tennyson, 
Esquires. Like other publications of the period, 
not in themselves remarkable, The Tribute has be- 
come rare, having been sought after of late years by 
students of Tennyson bibliography, on account of 
the Laureate's contribution therein, which is, no 
doubt, the first rough draft of what is now the 
twenty-fourth section of Maud, which was not pub- 
lished as a whole until eighteen years later. 

The social position of the Milnes family was an 
open sesame to the best life in London, and Milnes 
availed himself of the privileges that it conferred 
with an ardor which was inseparable from his tem- 
perament. He was young, he was pleasure-loving, 
he was clever, and he was ambitious. He was not 
content to be thought a poet, but was fain to distin- 
guish himself as a man of the world, an acknowl- 
edged wit, a brilliant talker, an ornament to society. 
If it was a weakness, it was one which he shared 



270 EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 

with most writers of his day, who were eager for 
personal triumphs, whether they were won in the 
soirees over which Lady Morgan, the Misses Berry, 
and Lydia White presided, or in the more brilliant 
circles that assembled at Lansdowne House, Hol- 
land House, and Gore House. 

The society with which he mingled in those hos- 
pitable mansions was the best of the time, represent- 
ing, as it did, whoever was most eminent in the in- 
tellectual walks of English life — statesmen and 
politicians, poets and philosophers, lords and ladies, 
professional wits and talkers, and now and then the 
lion of the season. At Lansdowne House he met 
the celebrities of the Whig Party, who figure in the 
Diary of Moore, who was a constant visitor ; at Hol- 
land House he met Sydney Smith, and a more liter- 
ary set ; and, at Gore House, Count d'Orsay, Ben- 
jamin Disraeli, Prince Louis Napoleon, and Lady 
Blessington, the hostess, who was not in the good 
books of her censorious sex. Wherever he went 
Milnes was at home, too much at home, some 
thought, for what with his high spirits and cool and 
easy demeanor, he differed from the majority of his 
countrymen. His manners resembled those of the 
people among whom he had lived in France, in 
Italy, in Greece more than the staid and measured 
proprieties of English life. Frank and natural, in- 
dividual and original, he was aggressive and auda- 



EICHAED MONCKTOIST MILLIES 271 

cious, and whatever his convictions, or fancied con- 
victions, he had the courage of them ; he offended 
prejudices with his paradoxes, and offended still 
more by defending them cavalierly. His cleverness 
made him enemies, and they told stories about him, 
and when there were no stories to tell they invented 
them, and so made him more enemies. He was 
much talked about, and much lied about. He was 
not ignorant of the estimation in which he was held, 
but his nature was so buoyant that he never lost his 
temper, or never but once, when he wrote to Sydney 
Smith, upon whom most of the sharp sayings about 
him were popularly fathered, who replied as follows : 
" Deae Milnes^ : — Never lose your temper, which 
is one of your best qualities, and which has carried 
you hitherto safely through your startling eccen- 
tricities. If you turn cross and touchy, you are a 
lost man. No man can combine the defects of oppo- 
site qualities. The names of Cool of the Evening, 
London Assurance, and Inigo Jones are, I give 
you my word, not mine. They are of no sort of im- 
portance ; they are safety-valves, and if you could 
by paying sixpence get rid of them you had bet- 
ter keep your money. You do me but justice in 
acknowledging that I have spoken much good of 
you. I have laughed at you for those follies which 
I have told you of to your face ; but nobody has 
more readily and more earnestly asserted that you 



272 EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 

are a very agreeable, clever man, with a very good 
heart, unimpeachable in all the relations of life, and 
that you amply deserve to be retained in the place 
to which you had too hastily elevated yourself by 
manners unknown to our cold and phlegmatic 
people. I thank you for what you say of my good 
humor. Lord Dudley, when I took leave of him, 
said to me : ' You have been laughing at me for the 
last seven years, and you never said anything which 
I wished unsaid.' This pleased me." 

Milnes thought so much of this letter that he in- 
serted it in Lady Holland's Life of Sydney Smith, 
and reading it in the last years of his life in his 
library at Fryston to his biographer, Mr. Wemyss 
Reicl, he said : " Don't you think that that was an 
admirable letter for an old man to write to a young 
one who had just played the fool ? " 

The death of William IV. in the summer of 1837, 
caused the dissolution of Parliament, and the elec- 
tion of new members, among whom was Milnes, 
who was chosen to represent the borough of Ponte- 
fract. He took his seat in the autumn alongside of 
Disraeli, and was more successful with his oratory 
than that fantastic young politician, whose maiden 
speech was laughed down. He was complimented 
by Stanley, who spoke of the powerful and feeling- 
language of the member for Pomfret, and by Peel, 
who said his speech was just the right thing. Hav- 



EICHAKD MONCKTON MILNES 273 

ing now begun life on his own account, and being 
in a sense a public character, he took rooms in Pall 
Mall. The setting up of this bachelor establishment 
of his was an important event, in that it introduced 
him to the great world of London in the character 
of a generous host, who exercised his hospitality in 
breakfasts. He followed in this mode of entertain- 
ment the national habit of his countrymen, con- 
cerning whom one of their satirists has said that if 
London were to be destroyed by an earthquake the 
survivors would meet among the ruins and celebrate 
the catastrophe ; and he followed, besides, the ex- 
ample of Rogers, whose breakfasts were preferred 
to his poetry. He had given them for years in his 
luxurious home in St. James's Place, and they were 
famous ; but they were not what they had been, for 
most of his early guests were dead or estranged, his 
wit had become malevolent, and his stories, like 
himself, had grown old. 

The breakfasts of Milnes were much talked about, 
so indiscriminate were his invitations thereto, and 
so unconventional some of his guests. Everybody 
who was anybody was to be found at them, and 
scores of nobodies in whom he was interested for 
the moment. Curious respecting all ranks and con- 
ditions of men, he was a student of character in his 
light way, and was tolerant of whatever was amus- 
ing. Statesmen and philosophers, mountebanks 
18 



274 EICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 

and quacks, all were fish that came to his net. To 
have done something, no matter what, or to be 
thought capable of doing something, no matter 
what, was a passport to his favor. The universality 
of his invitations, which were always accepted, was 
ridiculed, and many stories were current about them. 
One of these stories (which was not true) turned on 
a noted murderer, concerning whom some one at 
his table inquired if he had been hanged that morn- 
ing, and his sister replied : "I hope so, or Kichard 
will have him at his breakfast-party next Thursday." 
Caiiyle said that if Christ were on earth again 
Mimes would ask him to breakfast, and the clubs 
would all be, talking of the good things that Christ 
had said. And years afterward, when he and Carlyle 
were talking of the administration which Peel had 
just formed, and in which he was not included, as 
he had hoped to be, Carlyle remarked : " Peel knows 
what he is about ; there is only one post fit for you, 
and that is the office of perpetual president of the 
Heaven and Hell Amalgamation Society." 

What with his enjoyments and employments, 
Mimes was a busy man ; but busy as he was he 
found time to mediate the Muse, who, in his case, 
was not thankless, and to publish two volumes of 
verse, Memorials of a Residence on the Conti- 
nent, and Poems of Many Years. The excellence 
of these volumes, which was of a quiet, unobtrusive 



EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 275 

kind, was at once recognized by the critics and his 
fellow-poets, one of the oldest of whom, Landor, 
declaring that he was the greatest poet then living 
in England. Landor was mistaken, however, as he 
often was in his estimate of his friends (particularly 
his friend Southey), for greatness was alien to the 
genius of Milnes, which, active for a few years in 
poetry, finally abandoned it for other and more 
worldly pleasures and pursuits. "What he might 
have been as a poet we know not ; what he chose 
to be was a member of Parliament, a giver of break- 
fasts, a man of society and the world. 

But he was more than this : he was warm-hearted 
and high-minded ; he loved and lived for his friends, 
and was never weary in doing good. To need his 
help was to have it, whether it was deserved or not. 
His life was a round of generous acts, performed in 
secret and out of pure kindness. He was not a man 
of letters in the ordinary acceptation of the phrase ; 
but no man of letters ever honored the profession 
more highly than he, or ever encouraged and as- 
sisted its struggling members with more sympathy 
and heartiness. He understood the poetic temper- 
ament, its weakness, its pride, its lack of worldly 
wisdom, and was always ready to alleviate the ill- 
fortune which often attaches to it. Others in his 
place would have been content with relieving dis- 
tressed authors with money — anyone with a good 



276 EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 

bank account could do that ; but lie did more, for, 
giving* money freely, he gave with it his time and 
tact, his maturest consideration, and his most deli- 
cate feeling. When Hood, who was always poor, 
and often ill, was in his last illness, he busied him- 
self in procuring gratuitous contributions for his 
magazine, and when the sufferings of that beautiful 
spirit were ended, he started a subscription in be- 
half of his family, and raised a sum which placed his 
widow in comfort for the remainder of her days. 
To have helped and comforted Hood was a privilege 
and a distinction of which any man might have been 
proud. It was otherwise with David Gray, who was 
one of those poor creatures that, mistaking aspira- 
tions for achievement, delude themselves into the be- 
lief that they are poets, and whom we pity, in spite 
of their foolishness, but whom it is impossible to 
like or respect, their exactions are so unreasonable, 
and their vanity so enormous. 

But there are poets and poets, and there were 
pleasanter episodes in the life of Mimes than the 
one which has linked his name with that of Gray, 
and of these the most pleasant one in which his in- 
fluence was of essential and lasting service to his 
friend Tennyson. What led to it — its prologue, as 
one may say — is thus described by the biographer 
of Lord Houghton. " Eichard Mimes/' said Carlyle 
one day, withdrawing his pipe from his mouth, as 



EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 277 

they were seated together in the little house in 
Cheyne Row, " when are you going to get that pen- 
sion for Alfred Tennyson ? " " My clear Carlyle," 
responded Milnes, " the thing is not so easy as you 
suppose. What will my constituents say if I do get 
the pension for Tennyson? They know nothing 
about him or his poetry, and they will probably 
think he is some poor relation of my own, and that 
the whole affair is a job." Solemn and emphatic 
was Carlyle's response. "Bichard Milnes, on the 
Day of Judgment, when the Lord asks you why you 
didn't get that pension for Alfred Tennyson, it will 
not do to lay the blame on your constituents ; it is 
you that will be damned." Milnes went to Peel, 
who sometimes consulted others in regard to the 
Civil List, and found that he had never heard of 
Tennyson. He sent him Locksley Hall and Ulysses, 
and the poet forthwith received a pension of two 
hundred pounds per annum. 

What was most interesting in Milnes was not his 
career, but his character ; not the outward events of 
his life, which in the main was not unlike that of 
other English gentlemen of good family, who mingle 
in the social and political movements of their day, 
marry the women of their choice, to whom they are 
good husbands, and beget children, to whom they 
are good fathers ; but the intellectual individuality 
that impelled him to travel, to write, to give break- 



278 EICHAED MONCKTON MIL1STES 

fasts, to be cheery and kindly, the best of compan- 
ions, and the warmest of friends — in other words, 
the unique personality that made him the man he 
was. To understand this it is not necessary that 
we should pursue his biography further than we 
have done. Suffice it to say, then, that at the age 
of forty-two he married the Honorable Annabel 
Crewe, the younger daughter of the second Lord 
Crewe ; that at the age of fifty-four he was raised 
to the peerage as Baron Houghton of Great Hough- 
ton; and that he died at Vichy in his seventy- 
seventh year, and was buried in the little church- 
yard at Fryston. 

A change came over the hospitality of Milnes, 
which, chiefly exercised during his bachelor days at 
his chambers on Pall Mall, was transferred, after his 
marriage, to his Yorkshire home at Fryston. A sub- 
stantial country home, situated on the banks of the 
Clive, in a centre of gardens and shrubberies, with 
prairies of park and miles of larch and beechen 
woods, Fryston was just such a home as a scholarly 
author would desire, for besides the family portraits 
which covered its walls, masterpieces by Reynolds, 
Gainsborough, Romney, and Lawrence, it was filled 
with books. They were found not merely in the 
library proper, but in every room, in corridors, in 
odd nooks and corners, and on the staircase, the 
hall itself being converted into a library. And not 



EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 279 

the least among the treasures there were the books 
which their authors had presented to Milnes. " Of 
presentation copies there is literally no end at Fry- 
ston ; indeed, pages could be filled with a simple 
list of the books of various kinds which have been 
dedicated to him by their writers. It was his habit 
to insert in all these presentation volumes the let- 
ters which accompanied the gifts, so that a rambling 
survey of this portion of the book-shelves at Fry- 
ston is attended by many a delightful discovery, 
many an unexpected peep into the secret mind of 
the author who has brought his little tribute of 
friendship or admiration to the poet-peer." 

The friends of Milnes were as free of Fryston be- 
fore he became its master as of his chambers in 
London, and a story is told of Thackeray's first visit 
there and of his introduction to the elder Milnes, 
who, on learning that he smoked, said to him : 
" Pray, consider yourself at liberty, Mr. Thackeray, 
to smoke in any room in the house except my son's. 
I am sorry to say that he does not allow it." " Rich- 
ard, my boy," said Thackeray, slapping his friend 
on the back, "what a splendid father has been 
thrown away upon you ! " On another occasion he 
informed him that Fryston combined the graces of 
the chateau and the tavern. Carlyle, who seldom 
liked anything or anybody, enjoyed his visits to Fry- 
ston, and was so friendly to Milnes that he never 






280 BICHAED MONCKTON MIL1STES 

abused him in his correspondence. The hospitality 
of Milnes made Fryston a charming place to visit, 
and drew thither, year after year, the most distin- 
guished men of the time. He was the literary host 
of England, and whether his guests were famous or 
obscure, whether they belonged to the great world 
or had merely for the moment emerged from the 
masses, they could not be long in his company with- 
out feeling the charm of his manner, and being 
warmed and attracted by the tenderness of his heart. 
His fame as a talker was world-wide, and there is 
no need to say that the dinner-table at Fryston was 
the scene of a hundred happy encounters of wit, in- 
telligence, and knowledge. The character of Milnes 
was tersely summed up one evening, years ago, 
at the Cosmopolitan Club, by Mr. W. E. Foster, 
who, on his leaving earlier than usual, said to a 
friend beside him : "I have many friends who 
would be kind to me in distress, but only one who 
would be equally kind to me in disgrace, and he 
has just left the room." 

Lord Houghton was a poet, but rather of the kind 
that is made than of the kind that is born. He was 
drawn to poetry by his culture, which preferred the 
elegancies to the solidities of scholarship, and by his 
early friendships and associations. When he began 
to write the reputation of Wordsworth was higher 
than it had ever been before, or has ever been since, 



EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 281 

and he was enough influenced by it to be willing to 
shine in its reflected light. He was not sufficiently 
individual to be original, so he attached himself to 
the school of Wordsworth, success in which de- 
manded no mental endowments that were beyond 
his natural powers, and he ranked for a time among 
the most promising of his pupils. When the readers 
of these worthy gentlemen grew tired of them, as 
they did when they became interested in the richer 
and stronger verse of Tennyson and Browning, they 
were kindly relegated to the obscurity of unread 
libraries, and he among them. He was the best of 
the band. There are fine qualities in his verse, ten- 
derness and refinement of feeling, veins of pensive 
meditation, graces and felicities of expression, and 
at times imagination. His little love-songs are ex- 
quisite. There is a story attached to one of his 
poems which is worth telling, as an instance of the 
worthlessness of the criticism to which poets are 
sometimes subjected by their personal friends ; and 
as this poem happened to be a good one, I will 
give the story here, in the words of his biographer, 
Mr. Wemyss Eeid, to whom it was related by Lord 
Houghton himself. The incident upon which it 
was founded occurred in his twenty-seventh year, 
during a visit to Ireland. "He was driving, he 
said, to the house of his friends the O'Briens, in one 
of the national cars, and as the horse's feet beat 



282 RICHAKD MONCKTON MILNES 

upon the road, they seemed to hammer out in his 
own head certain rhythmical ideas, which quickly 
formed themselves into rhymes. By the time he had 
reached Trathol the little poem was complete, and 
immediately on entering his own room he sat down 
and committed it to paper. It was the well-known 
song beginning, 'I wandered by the brook-side,' 
and having the refrain 

' But the beating of my own heart 
Was all the sound I heard.' 

" When he came down to dinner he brought the 
verses with him, and showed them to his friends. 
They were unanimous in declaring them to be wholly 
unworthy of his powers and the reputation which 
he already enjoyed, and they urged upon him the 
virtue of committing them at once to the flames. 
As it happened, the little verses which thus met with 
so cold a reception when they were first launched 
upon the world, were destined to attain perhaps a 
wider fame and popularity than anything else which 
fell from his pen. From the first moment of their 
publication they caught the ear of the public ; they 
were set to music almost directly they had been 
printed, rival composers competing for the privilege 
of associating their names with them ; and little 
more than twelve months after that lonely ride on 
the Irish highway, when the first idea of the poem 



EICHAED MONCKTON MILNES 283 

came into Milnes's mind, a friend of his who was sail- 
ing down a river in the Southern States of North 
America, heard the slaves as they hoed in the planta- 
tions keeping time by singing a parody of the lines 
now universally familiar." Mr. Eeid adds to this 
pleasant story a little note concerning the personal- 
ity of Lord Houghton, and an incident which oc- 
curred in his later years, as he was walking one day 
in London with a friend. " Passing the end of a 
street he paused, listened eagerly to a wandering 
singer whose voice had reached him, and then dart- 
ing off in pursuit of the man, reappeared quickly, 
with a glow of delight on his face. ( I knew it was 
my song ! ' he exclaimed, showing a roughly printed 
broadside bearing the words of his famous song." 
Here, without further comment, is the song. 

I wandered by the brook-side, 

I wandered by the mill, 
I could not bear tbe brook flow, 

Tbe noisy wbeel was still ; 
There was no burr of grasshopper, 

No chirp of any bird, 
But the beating of my own heart 

Was all the sound I heard. 

I sat beneath the elm-tree, 

I watched the long, long shade, 

And as it grew still longer 
I did not feel afraid : 



284 KICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 

For I listened for a footfall, 

I listened for a word ; 
But the beating of my own heart 

Was all the sound I heard. 

He came not, no, he came not, 

The night came on alone, 
The little stars sat one by one 

Each on his golden throne ; 
The evening air passed by my cheek, 

The leaves above were stirred, 
But the beating of my own heart 

Was all the sound I heard. 

Fast silent tears were flowing 

When something stood behind, 
A hand was on my shoulder, 

I knew its touch was kind ; 
It drew me nearer, nearer, 

We did not speak one word, 
For the beating of our own hearts 

Was all the sound we heard. 



THE END 



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